Courses They Should Actually Be Teaching In College

[UCEadmin]

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The “Thought Catalog” suggests some courses that should be taught in college. Would you like these courses to be offered at HKUST? Some of these topics are indeed close to our daily life: networking, making friends, data skills, coping skills, personal finance…etc. Do you have others to add to the list?

How would you like to learn to master these: through taking courses (credit-bearing!) or through other means? HKUST students are too overloaded with courses already. What possibly are those “other means”? Learning through our life experience? Extra-curricular activities? Peers? Mentors? Mistakes? Observations?

[Aquarius]

it seems to emphasize soft skills which are hard to teach, compared to solid knowledge. And I am not sure if students especially those who are used to memorizing lots of stuff from textbooks would like it. And sometimes when the school offer a course officially and we are forced to study it, the topic would become boring.

[akedia]

Further to the statement above, there is a lot of room for courses that teach you how to be successful in life, rather than teach you PURE CONTENT. You don't really need a teacher to teach you content, you can study that through a variety of sources not limited to textbooks and professors.

In fact, some of the courses that really need to be understaken, are courses in Emotional Intelligence for example. Not teaching one WHAT is emotional intelligence but rather HOW can you develop solid EQ.

Courses on Articulation, be it written, verbal or non-verbal; again not teaching one WHAT is good articulation but rather HOW to have good articulation. These are skills or abilities that have a ripple effect throughout one's life. The content itself is not what's of pertinent relevance. You may forget content but abilities that are learned and applied are more difficult to forget.

A primary issue that comes into place is the idea of state-dependent learning...that the course we study in school is difficultt o translate out into the real-world which is why companies need to always train new employees from scratch. Can we teach courses that bridge this gap better, so we can apply into the so-called real-world?

I could go on and on...but i'll leave it here..for now.