Isak Frumin and I have recently spoken to Xiaojun Zhang, the Chief Education Officer at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. XJLU turned out to be one of the most fascinating cases we've looked at this year. Here are my main takeaways:
1. XJLU is a daughter university of Xi'an Jiaotong University and University of Liverpool, and yet it is unlike either. This is quite rare. Typically, joint projects aspire to emulate their parent universities. The lesson that could be learnt here: if you are entering a partnership, you might as well create something new.
2. Speaking about new things, prior to the webinar, we had been skeptical of the term "syntegrative education", which is how XJLU has named its educational model. But no, it makes perfect sense. XJLU's students do not just integrate their learning experiences (which include internships, real projects with industry, courses co-taught with researchers and industry professionals, mentorships, etc.), they also create synergies between them, largely thanks to the systematic approach to university-industry integration the university takes. Synergetic + integrative = syntegrative. The lesson: a new approach beckons a new name. *Incidentally, it would be interesting to see how syntegrative education compares to PBL (understood both as project- and problem-based learning).
Explore the case for yourself following the link below.
#Innovative_Universities
[Note: Views in this post are the author's own and not her employer's]
