Over the past decade, China has been actively looking for more effective ways to transform and upgrade its higher education system. The Chinese strategy is designed to emphasize quality enhancements rather than simple quantitative expansion. To help achieve its goals, the Chinese government has approved establishment of a number of independent Sino-foreign universities across the country. It is hoped that these joint-venture universities will help facilitate the transfer of international education experience, high-level management know-how, advanced teaching methods and sophisticated approaches to curriculum development and execution.
Among these new model institutions is Duke Kunshan University, which is rooted in the soil of China and jointly founded by prestigious universities – Duke University in the United States and China’s own Wuhan University.
Located in Kunshan’s Yangcheng Lake Science and Technology Park of Jiangsu province, DKU is regarded as an active and ambitious exploration in the country’s higher education. With the goal of producing a high-quality, research-oriented, comprehensive and international world-class university, it has vowed to build a high-quality higher education platform in China through an innovative approach that blends liberal arts education with Chinese tradition.
“DKU is designed to serve as an innovative educational platform for the delivery of a liberal arts academic program that will enable our graduates to live and work effectively and ethically in the globalized world of the 21st century. We hope to provide relevant skills and knowledge while at the same time offering a learning environment that will allow each and every student a chance to realize their own potential,” said Denis Simon, executive vice-chancellor of Duke Kunshan University.
DKU welcomed its first students in August 2014 and currently offers three Master’s degree programs – management studies, medical physics, and global health – and an undergraduate program called the Global Learning Semester.
So far, more than 250 students have studied under DKU’s academic programs, and the enrollments are expected to grow as the university expands its course offerings and faculty size.
“Innovation and a liberal arts education go together,” Simon said.
Utilizing a broad array of inputs from many sources, Duke has engineered a series of innovations for the DKU curriculum. Compared with most Chinese universities, liberal arts education has been given much more emphasis at DKU.
“Our goal is to build an interdisciplinary, research-inflected liberal arts university. We have put in motion the idea that a liberal arts education can provide a useful set of tools and skills as well as perspectives about life and the world to enable students to diversify the choices before them upon graduation,” Simon said.
“Some students through the Global Learning Semester program have started to recognize that there are disadvantages as well as plus factors associated with specialization. We also have brought into the DKU classroom setting through our pedagogy concepts such as critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, working in teams, and interdisciplinary thinking,” he said.
Meanwhile, DKU also introduced a modular curriculum structure that compresses the student learning experience into 7.5 weeks instead of 14 to 15.
“Many millennial-aged students seem to like getting their education in compressed doses rather than waiting to learn new material over 15 weeks. This may be because of the expanded use of smartphones and the onset of the digital world. Our hope is to be able to accommodate multiple learning styles. Of course, students also benefit greatly from the small size of the DKU classes and the regular individual and small group interactions with our faculty,” Simon said.
The Global Learning Semester program has received more than 50 students each semester, with the bulk of students coming from some of China’s best universities. And reports from students indicate they are very pleased with this type of program, especially the class size and the focused attention they receive from the DKU faculty, according to the university.
Simon said the curriculum at DKU, as presently conceived, will emphasize academic concentrations rather than traditional majors and students will explore new vistas that will lead them outside of their normal comfort zones to explore new, exciting cross-cutting areas of inquiry and study.
“Most young people will have many jobs in their careers and may even have several careers across their professional lives. This means they must have great mental dexterity to deal with a more fluid world and a world in which technology is changing the way we interact on a regular basis. DKU is sensitive to the changing work-life continuum that is altering the way we think about jobs, professions, careers and specialization,” Simon said.
Simon also noted that DKU emphasized end-to-end service for its students. There will be three parts to the DKU experience: recruitment and enrollment; the overall student experience on and off campus; and career services, including internship opportunities that hopefully will evolve into formal job offers. Career services also include helping those students interested in graduate school secure the types of support and advice to enable them to make good choices about appropriate places for graduate study, including the possibility of staying at DKU for their Masters degree or attending Duke in the US.
“DKU intends to be a center of excellence for helping our graduates realize their dreams in a world in which many of the jobs they get may not even exist today. This is the same thing that happened as a result of the development of the Internet a decade ago and it is likely to happen again as we see the continued impact of the information revolution as well as the new, promising advancements occurring in life sciences, new energy and new materials,” he said.
Future expansion
DKU is preparing to enter its next phase of development. The university has been working hard to develop a proposed undergraduate degree program as well as the on-going expansion of graduate degree programs, the initiation of executive education programs and the continued delivery of the Global Learning Semester.
“We are working with our Chinese partners as we evolve our curriculum for the undergraduate program to ensure that it is appropriately sensitive to the fact that it is being delivered in a Chinese setting. We also hope that our curriculum for our undergraduate students will be sufficiently internationalized so that they can work in the types of cross-border, cross-cultural and cross-functional teams that already increasingly define the major work modalities of the 21st century work environment,” Simon said.
The university said the recruitment goals for its undergraduate program are aimed at enrolling a truly international cohort, with the bulk of students coming from China complemented by a sizable percentage of students from the US, Asia, and other parts of the world.
Besides that, DKU is also planning to create a new library, which is different than the traditional library model of the past.
“Today, because of the advancement of digital technologies and the growth of electronic databases, libraries have become not simply centers for housing books and periodicals, but places where students gather to leverage information resources as they work in collaborative teams and small groups,” Simon said.
“One of the key things to remember about DKU is that it is designed not only to deliver great value to China and to bring a broader perspective about liberal arts education into the Chinese higher education system. Just as important as the impact and contribution that Duke will make to China is the impact that DKU will have on Duke University,” Simon said.
This article is originally published by China Daily on page 26 of the September 25, 2015 issue. Click here to read the original article.
