Learning as an Epidemic: The 'Tipping Point', Freshman Academy, and Institutional Change. Perspective

Institutions of higher education are complicated, unwieldy things. This is part of their beauty, but it is also part of their difficulty, for their complications make them slow to change, even when the value of change is widely agreed upon. Whether change grows from a campus-wide mandate with strong support, or is the aspiration of a small group of people, the authors of this paper state that those leading change would do well to consider the implications of change models that rely on social networks and social connections for their implementation. Presented as an example is Brigham Young University's Freshman Academy (FA), a learning community initiative for first-year students. The central assumption of Freshman Academy and other learning communities efforts in the USA is that students will learn better if they build strong social and intellectual networks amongst themselves, and if the curricula of their courses make sense when considered together.