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Academic Goals
The HDDP aims at creating programs designed to enable graduates to succeed in the global forum of skills and ideas. Offered in French and English, the projected degrees will ensure and certify that students are prepared for highly skilled private or public sector jobs, for postgraduate programs in liberal professions, or for further academic study at the world's best universities.
Degree Structure
Should the Project receive ministerial consent for its applications, the proposed institution would offer three-year Bachelor and four-year Honours Bachelor degrees composed of 30 and 40 one-semester courses respectively. All projected courses will be offered in each of four 12-week terms each year. Students would be able to take any number of courses in any term, a system which allows for great flexibility. For example, students taking five courses each and every term would finish a four-year honours degree in two years; students taking five courses every other term would graduate in four years; and students taking two courses each semester would complete an honours degree in five years.
Maximal Flexibility, Coherence and Accreditation
The projected degrees would focus on structuring all courses taken by students into meaningful areas of emphasis and on providing recognition for these emphases. The degrees proposed by the Project would include four levels of emphasis: specialization (20 courses), major (15 courses), concentration (10 courses), and minor (5 courses).
A four-year degree would require either a specialization or a double major, and a three-year degree, a single major. Courses taken outside the degree specialization or major(s) would in turn form concentrations or minors which would be recorded on the degree and diploma. A great many combinations would be possible, but a student might, for example, graduate from a four-year degree program with a double major in Philosophy and English Literature, and with minors in French and History. In this way, all courses taken would generate a maximum return for students in terms of the credentials obtained.
Focus on Primary Works
The projected programs would cater exclusively to highly literate students and would make the most important books within each of the disciplines studied the clear focus of all courses. All other elements (lectures, tutorials, discussions, quizzes, and papers) would serve to deepen students’ understanding of primary works, which should be read in their entirety wherever possible.
This approach would afford students a strongly differentiated choice as compared to most public university programs, which have moved away from humanities methods towards “topics”-based courses and “studies”-style programs focusing more on contemporary secondary texts and less on historically significant primary texts..
Historicity
A methodological cornerstone of study in the humanities, the historical approach is the foundation on which understanding of a given discipline is progressively edified. Whereas the relation between historical chronology and the succession of courses is haphazard in today’s public universities, the envisioned programs would begin with a study of pre-modern and Renaissance texts in first year. With some flexibility and overlap, second-year courses would then cover 17th century and early 18th century texts, third-year courses late 18th and 19th century texts, and 20th and 21st century texts would be covered in the fourth year (for the sake of breadth of coverage, students wishing to take only a three-year degree would take a mix of third-year and fourth-year courses in their final year). This single, structural measure should help students develop a far better understanding of their chosen discipline than they would by taking courses in random order.
Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation
The projected programs would provide continuous and comprehensive evaluation through digital technology and concentrated, individual feedback. Since digital technology allows the comprehensive function of the traditional final exam to take the form of continuous interactive quizzes, the term paper would retake pride of place as the main vehicle of evaluation. Students’ understanding of each week’s primary readings would be guided and assessed by quizzes, while their global ability to understand and apply the material of each course would be demonstrated and evaluated by means of their final paper. Given that term papers are indispensable for high-quality learning in the humanities, they would be extensively and intensively marked, and students would receive detailed, personalized advice on how to improve every aspect of their work.