Course Content
At LIS, you study problems. Forget about studying a single discipline, major, or minor. But don't mistake it for being any less academic.
To conquer these intricate problems, you'll explore a diverse range of interdisciplinary perspectives from the arts, social sciences, humanities and sciences. You'll uncover methods that sharpen your qualitative and quantitative skills, equipping you with the right tools to tackle each challenge head-on.
Say goodbye to tedious, never-ending exams. At LIS, you'll tackle real-life, tangible problems and collaborate with actual organisations. This hands-on approach allows you to apply your newfound skills and knowledge, generating valuable and impactful work that prepares you for the professional world.
Curious to know more? Keep scrolling!
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Complex Problems
You will start each term with a clear, important question relating to a complex problem, such as Inequality, the Ethics of AI, and Climate Change, and learn to take an interdisciplinary approach to tackle them.
In two-week cycles, you'll engage with multiple disciplines simultaneously, gaining insights from across the arts, social science, humanities and science fields. For example, when exploring the topic of inequality, you'll examine it through the lenses of subjects such as Neuroscience, Network Science, Political Economy, and Linguistics. This comprehensive approach equips you with a range of skills, including epistemology (theory of knowledge), problem-framing, pitching, and public speaking, all of which are crucial for understanding and addressing these challenges effectively.
Methods
Along with studying different disciplinary perspectives on these complex problems, you will integrate qualitative and quantitative methods, which will enable you to apply what you know. They are tools and techniques, literacies and competencies, designed to improve your learning by doing, and help you take action in the world.
You will learn to play with words and numbers, to code and to narrate through video and podcasts, to experiment and to interpret. The methods and skills you will learn at LIS are foundational and transferable. They will help you navigate the challenges addressed throughout your degree and prepare you to tackle challenges in the professional world.
Independent Work
During your time at LIS, you will have multiple opportunities to work on independent projects that will allow you to delve deeper into specific areas of interest. You will produce interdisciplinary research projects based on problems of your choice and present them using your multimedia skills learned throughout the programme.
You’ll also have the chance to do genuine work of value throughout your degree - whether that’s via a project brief in term time, where an organisation asks you to help them with a problem, or during your 5-week, paid summer internship.
Coaching
Our approach to coaching is designed to support synthesis and encourage metacognition; it is an opportunity for you and other students to come together in small groups, with the support of an academic tutor, to reflect on the learnings from different modules, and develop ideas about how to apply those learnings to tackling the problem.
Coaching creates a supportive environment where you can share the challenges of rigorous interdisciplinary learning with other students and faculty, while learning to think peripherally and laterally. It is through coaching that you will learn how to become a true interdisciplinarian.
Coaching will take place weekly in students’ Problems groups, and will be led by an academic tutor who’ll support students as they learn to work collaboratively and start to think in an interdisciplinary way.
The curriculum
Throughout Year 1, you’ll gain key knowledge and skills from a diverse range of disciplines, with real-world problems acting as a framework for your thinking. You’ll build on this foundation in Years 2 and 3, becoming equipped with an increasingly sharp, interdisciplinary problem-solving toolkit.
The content of our modules is subject to change as we revise our modules each year depending on student feedback, developments in the field, and the complex problems of the modern world.
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To gain a degree in the UK you must pass a certain number of credits in each year of the degree. Each module is given a credit, which you are awarded when you pass each module at assessment.
We reserve the right to not run a module if there is insufficient student interest.
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