I just wrapped up my first week of classes (or “modules,” as they’re called here) at the Dublin Institute of Technology. It was a completely different experience than any I’ve had in my three semesters at MU.

I know I’m going to be challenged to actually think (and think in unique ways), and I’ll have to be more disciplined than I ever have been. But at the end of the term, I also feel like I’ll have learned more in one semester here than I could in one at MU.

There are five key characteristics of education at DIT that could be applied by MU to greatly enhance the student learning experience:

**1. Better scheduling practices**

At DIT, modules (or classes) are scheduled in two, one-hour blocks or one, two-hour block each week. If it’s one of the two-days-each-week modules, then it will most likely be scheduled on consecutive days (say Tuesday and Wednesday) or on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There’s no three-day, Monday/Wednesday/Friday spreads or awkward classes happening on, say, Tuesday and Friday.

As an exchange student with total freedom in choosing my courses, this allowed me to consolidate five classes into only two days each week. For a girl who has taken 18 credit hours and five days of classes each semester of her college career, this is quite the luxury, and I’m definitely going to be enjoying my four-day weekends and Wednesdays off.

But I’ll also have more time to prepare for the week ahead, and if I were at home, this would give me much more time to work part-time or even have an internship.

If MU wanted to keep classes at three credit hours each week, it would be easy to make the transition to two 90-minute blocks on consecutive days.

Three days of one-hour classes might be a little much, but on the other hand, the loss of an hour each week at DIT hasn’t stopped anyone from having a career yet.

**2. The module system**

From what I understand, modules and their American equivalent of classes are virutally the same, except for two key points: Modules are the courses specifically required for a degree that form the majority of a student’s schedule in each semester. The second and most important distinction is that the same students attend their modules together. So it’s very likely that most of your modules during the year with be filled with the same crowd of 15 or so students, though this might vary by a few students here and there.

It was amazing how tightly-bonded the students in my classes were because of this, and I believe it really encourages cooperation and cohesion in the student body.

I’m not sure how well this would fit at MU in independent degree programs, such as journalism, but it could work well in a program like business, where the consistency of those in the modules would mirror the consistency of interacting with the same colleagues on a daily basis in the “real world.”

The tradeoff for students would come if it came down to affording students more power in consolidating their schedules, as mentioned in No. 1, or instituting this system, which fixes a student’s schedule more than independent registration.

**3. Motivating students with motivating lectures**

Granted, MU and other good universities don’t actively try to do anything but this. But classes, unless exceptionally inspiring, tend to feel like a checkmark toward a degree. And American students (myself included) catch onto that mentality: show up, sit through it, take exam, be done. You can make very good grades without really being challenged.

But at DIT, two unspoken rules exist that radically alter the student experience: No laptops in lectures and no texting. Surprisingly, it’s not a school policy – it’s something students just do on their own. Why does it work – and work voluntarily at DIT?

The lectures are actually engaging in a way I’ve rarely experienced at home. It’s fostered by the casual classroom atmosphere: Chairs are scattered casually about the room, students are free to raise a point without raising their hands, and professors are addressed by first name only.

Furthermore, classes are extremely small (no more than 20 in each class), which allows personal connections to form. This encourages conversational banter during lectures, which in turn encourages academic debate. I’ve never seen so many students actively participate in a lecture discussion.

**4. The finals system**

Additionally, students have an extrensic motivation to make sure they understand the material for one very crucial reason. Many courses only have one exam: the final.

In one of my classes, my essay exam will be worth 100 percent of my grade; in others, my grade is split 50-50 between an exam and a final project. Never will you find exams every three weeks, and very rarely will a class be continuously assessed, unless it’s a journalism class, in which each article counts toward your final grade.

Thus, it becomes up to the student to make sure they understand the material as it’s taught throughout the semester. Instead of having to worry about a test every two weeks, then promptly forgetting the material and moving on to the next unit, the final will wrap up what they’ve learned during the semester, and it’s up to them to prove they know it. It’s also another reason why there’s only two hours for each module during the week – it allows students to review and prepare material during their extra time.

**5. Cross-applying subject material and reapplying it in novel ways**

Lecturers draw upon material from other courses the students have taken and then use it in creative ways that re-applies what students know. For example, we discussed the Kant’s philosophy of truth and reality in my film studies class and applied it to how truth and objectivity is presented in documentaries.

Reapplying existing knowledge creates an element of consistency that’s virtually unknown in the “forget-what-you-learned-after-finals” mentality of start-and-stop American courses. It also challenges students to think about what they already know in different ways.

Even just adopting one of these measures would, I believe, really help students get more out of their MU experience. The university is wonderful already, but all too often, it seems like students find themselves simply marking courses off their degree requirements instead of being able to actually learn and be inspired by their work. The system components at DIT create a less-than-systemic environment, and instead, challenge students to think, analyze and debate in an incredibly extraordinary way.