17 of the Most Innovative Courses of the 2019/2020 Academic Year

Sanna Sharp

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Published in

Campuswire

4 min readFeb 20, 2020

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These faculty members go above and beyond in instructing their students.

Each year, millions of students in the United States compete for entrance into the nation’s top institutions. These students hope to become experts in their chosen fields of study; to glean knowledge from the decorated and distinguished faculty members who instruct them.

But the quality of a university’s faculty is not solely measured by the number of doctorates they award, nor by the respective institutional ranking of the school at which they research. What college students need more than almost anything else –– with the possible exception of student loan forgiveness –– is inspiration.

Students deserve professors who not only understand the topics they teach, but who embody them. They need professors who can re-engineer a General Education requirement into a must-take course. They need professors who care so deeply about their research, about their field, that their excitement over the topic at hand is palpable. Students need professors who think outside of the box, and who encourage them to as well.

What universities–– and the students who attend them–– need is: innovation.

To create this list I poured through dozens of catalogs from institutions of higher education, each containing hundreds of course offerings. I wanted to isolate courses offered on topics that hadn’t been taught before, as well as those offered on topics that had been––but which were now being taught in resourceful and effective new ways.

The following list is the cumulation of my catalog research. More importantly, it is the cumulation of the years each professor named herein spent studying, researching, understanding, and teaching their subject. These professors have worked tirelessly to create new courses and innovate old ones, all to provide their students with the highest tier of education possible.

In no particular order, here are seventeen of the most innovative courses offered at American institutions within the 2019–2020 school year.