University President John J. DeGioia and Provost Robert Groves will launch a new initiative, “Designing the Future(s) of the University,” an effort to rethink the framework and future of education, Wednesday.
The university is launching the program to assert more control over its future during a time of change in higher education, especially in the face of massive open online courses and new approaches to teaching.
“This initiative was born in that, and we have called it ‘Designing the Future(s)’ because we believe that it’s not about being afraid of how we’re going to be disrupted or how we’re not going to be able to do what we want to do, but to ask the design questions,” Vice Provost for Education Randall Bass said. “What kind of institution do we want to become?”
Although the initiative will discuss what aspects of Georgetown will remain the most integral to its identity in the future, the program will also assess what Georgetown hopes to give its students in the coming years and how the boundaries of formal education can be expanded. The initiative is intended to explore issues related to education broadly, but no concrete changes have been announced.
“We’ve been building our capacity to think about this as a whole campus over the last few years, and now we believe we’re at a position to think not just about innovation at the course level but to think about innovation at the level of whole educational packages, how entire curriculum might be delivered,” Bass said. “We don’t expect that we’re going to change most of what we do, but we feel that what we want to do is generate a few experiments that really push the boundaries of the kind of education that we value.”
Possible changes to educational approaches include creating a dual certification program that will combine undergraduate and master’s programs that will span four to five years, skill-based learning that will allow students to complete degrees at their own pace and better integrating internships into the curriculum.
The initiative will also evaluate new ways of delivering the Georgetown education, focusing on massive open online courses. Georgetown launched its first MOOC on Oct. 1.
“The students coming to Georgetown now come to us with a great set of skills built around the internet, and other universities are exploring how we can redefine how we do educational programming,” Provost Robert Groves said. “We want to look at real concrete things, we want to let the students, and the faculty, and the alumni and student services examine whether we can have new kinds of degree programs that might be more self-paced.”
Incorporating these technological aspects into a liberal arts education at Georgetown will be a major focus of the initiative.
“We’re deeply committed to a version of liberal education, and I think we’re also committed to asking the question of what is a version of liberal education that can only be created in a world that is saturated with technology – global and fundamentally interdisciplinary, and it’s not just about preserving Georgetown liberal education from the past but reinventing it in this moment in history and in this point in the century going forward,” Bass said.
A spring 2013 course co-taught by Bass and distinguished visiting professor Ann Pendleton-Jullian called “The Future of Georgetown University as a Design Problem” explored similar ideas. They will teach the course again this spring.
After reviewing precedent studies about design, the course’s students were divided into groups and challenged to build a design for a university in by 2033, starting with the most basic level.
“It was very hard for us at first to say what boundary conditions to create in an education – where do we want students to bump up against, and where does the university do a really great job of that already and where do we maybe need to change those things,” Evan Markley (COL ’15), who took the course, said.
Although the class is not directly related to the initiative, Bass and Pendleton-Jullian recently presented the students’ final projects to Groves and DeGioia.
“They wanted universities that were all about learning through doing, and this issue about wanting to participate in the world,” Pendleton-Jullian said. “How do we prepare better for the real world? And how do we make sense of the world around us? So these became the themes running through the whole projects.”
The initiative will officially launch Wednesday with a discussion between DeGioia and Groves that will focus on the current challenges the university faces in higher education and provide framework for the future of the program.
After the official launch, the initiative will continue through a series of connected events that discuss the university’s educational mission and focus on the overlap between exploration of the issues of higher education posed by thought leaders, the engagement of students, faculty and staff and experimentation in ways to deliver a Georgetown education.
“We want to begin a dialogue, and students have got to be part of this,” Groves said. “It’ll be Georgetown’s way of reacting to new tools we have in the world and new student interests, and asking the question, ‘Can we do things differently in a way that achieves even deeper academic excellence than we’re achieving now?'”

Hoya Staff Writers Kayla Cross and Jennifer Ding contributed reporting.