Mission
As Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education, my role is to integrate the undergraduate experience by ensuring collaboration and cohesion across BU through giving students a passport to the fascinating areas of learning that can be found in every quadrant of this university. This is an exciting time in both BU’s history and that of undergraduate education itself across North America. We are taking a new look at what constitutes basic knowledge and advanced research, and we are dedicated to increasing the opportunities for students to gain both wide-angled and narrowly focused perspectives in a variety of fields. Innovations in personal and classroom technology certainly play an important—but by no means the only—role in enabling undergraduates to exercise greater personal choices and learn within and across disciplines, extend their creative and intellectual interests, engage in research, maximize their potential, and develop a global frame of reference.
Over the next year, the idea of “One BU” will guide the central projects that will be developed from this office. With the assistance of Information Technology, we have just completed a new course description database that allows for searches of the BU course bulletin by keywords, revealing how a single topic is distributed among the 17 colleges and 7,000 courses at BU. Over the next year, we will be making iTunes U and ePortfolio available campus-wide, and we have just begun to assemble a task force that will propose how we can eliminate barriers in undergraduate education and replace them with bridges.
