Mucking About in the Mess: Research-based Education at Quest University Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The design of Quest University Canada began with a blank sheet of paper and a question: How do we create the most effective and engaging undergraduate education for students who will graduate into a rapidly changing, globalized world?The answer was to center education around the formulation of good questions and the processes by which one attempts to address them, rather than focusing instruction on the delivery of information.This leads naturally to having tutors who teach, rather than professors who profess.It leads to seminar rooms rather than lecture halls.It leads to dissolving disciplinary boundaries so good questions can easily cross them.It leads to a student-centered, project-based curriculum of exploration, rather than a fact-based transfer of information and its subsequent regurgitation.It leads to a collaborative rather than a competitive learning environment.And it produces students with highly developed skills in written and oral communication who are instinctively collaborative, inherently trans-disciplinary in their approach to problems, and engaged in their local and global communities.Quest University Canada, the country's first independent, not-for-profit secular university, was created by an act of the British Columbia Legislative Assembly in 2002.By 2006, it had a faculty of seven and a program designed (and approved) to award a single degree: the Bachelor of Arts and Sciences.In September of 2007, we welcomed our first 73 students to a purpose-built campus in Squamish, British Columbia, between the city of Vancouver and the Olympic resort of Whistler.Today we have 50 faculty members, have reached our goal of 700 students, and have 250 graduates striving to change the world.Most universities today are structured around a 19th-century model designed to produce graduates for a 19th-century economy-one that needed experts with heads crammed full of specialized information ready to be applied to an industrial enterprise.These experts usually had a single career during their working lives, and the pace of change in what they needed to know was modest.Problems were local or, at most, national in scale, and interaction with people from other cultures and traditions was unusual.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".