Learn in a Dynamic Setting

Unlike the passive lectures most university students endure, all Minerva classes are small seminars, which focus on discussion, debate, and collaborative work sessions. This active learning approach stimulates deep cognition, enhancing your understanding of course material and furthering your ability to apply concepts to unfamiliar situations in novel ways.

Your classes are conducted via Forum™, Minerva’s virtual learning environment, which is built specifically to facilitate synchronous instruction. In each session, your professor prompts you and fewer than 20 classmates to participate in the lively exchange of ideas and deep engagement with course material that are the hallmarks of active learning.

You move fluidly between discussion, breakout groups, debates, simulations, quizzes, polls, and team presentations, as you travel throughout each city and around the world. These innovative features, as well as class recordings, participation data, and performance tracking over time, make Forum fundamental to the Minerva instruction and assessment methodologies.

Improved Instruction

Forum is designed to improve instruction by allowing your professors to provide frequent, detailed evaluation of your performance. This individualized feedback is based on data collected continuously during each class. As you participate, your professors gain deep insight into your strengths, level of understanding, and areas for improvement. Every session is recorded, providing an accessible archive of class activity.

In addition, a sophisticated learning management system enhances your studies outside of class. You are able to access assignments easily, track your progress across courses, and effectively direct your academic development.

Sophisticated Educational Tools

Advanced interactive features let you move dynamically from group discussion into other instruction modes, including breakout groups, debates, quizzes and polls, collaborative document creation and editing, and real-time simulations. These tools help to ensure that every class is both intellectually stimulating and academically rigorous.

As the platform for your coursework, Forum enhances your intellectual growth by enabling interactions not possible in a traditional classroom setting:

Instantaneous Breakout Groups
Breakout groups enable professors to facilitate smaller group work quickly and easily. Within seconds, you and your classmates can be divided up based on specific criteria such as key strengths, areas for improvement, or individual specialization. Any resulting output is then automatically integrated into the class and associated with each of the individual participants.

Quizzes, Polls, and Simulations
Periodic quizzes and polls help your professors determine students’ overall understanding of specific topics during — not after — class time. They also promote engagement from you and your classmates by providing meaningful pauses in the discussion. Similarly, real-time simulations enable rapid evaluation of hypotheses for subjects ranging from social behavior to physical and biological dynamics.

Collaborative Documents
Collaborative documents facilitate active and interactive learning during class – in real time. Professors and students demonstrate and write on documents, show photos, pull up websites, and play videos. You can take notes, edit documents, see classmates’ contributions, and receive an archive of notes after class.

Individualized Feedback
Feedback sessions with your professors improve upon what is possible with one-on-one meetings. You and your professor both have insights into class time data, quiz scores, grading, and other measurable information. During your meetings, you can both watch and review video from previous classes, allowing for precise feedback — in context — on aspects of your personal performance.