AGU – as a research university seeking solutions to global challenges and aiming at developing citizens who can contribute to societies and shape the future (AGU Mission Statement) – developed an innovative Global Challenge Curriculum (GLB) composed of one mandatory course and several elective courses taught throughout the four Undergraduate academic years. These courses focus on global topics such as the ones tackled by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

AGU Global Courses Objectives:

•      To help students comprehend and seek solutions to current and future world challenges in an innovative and stimulating class environment.
•       To help students develop and improve soft and hard skills that are relevant to today’s job market
•       To Establish a culture of dialogue, debate, “Learning by Doing”, teamwork, empathy and participatory learning
•      To enable progress through the blending of all 3 Contemporary University Missions: Education, Research and Societal Impact

AGU Global Courses:

GLB 101: “AGU WAYS” (Credit 3, ECTS 4)

AGU is a new generation university that aims to blend all three missions of a university that are societal impact, research and education. The blending will lead us to generate a philosophy that is called the AGUWAYS. AGUWAYS gives priority to societal impact in the blending process. Societal impact is embodied in global challenges and the course is there designed around and is also an introduction to global challenges. In addition, AGUWAYS aims to develop a competence in blending changing, knowing and learning through embracing real world problems.

GLB 102: “Innovation and Entrepreneurship”  (Credit 3, ECTS 5)

The main aim of this course is to provide students with the entrepreneurial orientation and mindset. Some of the elements that are key for a successful start-up and will be covered in this course are, the ability to seek and explore opportunities, value proposition, understanding customers, having a solid marketing plan, working with a good team, understanding the technology, and financing and managing the cash flows. Creating new businesses also requires a good understanding of innovation. New discoveries, new technologies, competition, and globalization compel both entrepreneurs and existing firms to foster innovation. This course also examines the theory and practice of promoting and managing innovation in start-ups and existing firms.

GLB 201: “Food and Health” (Credit 3, ECTS 5)

GLB201 is designed to introduce information on global issues related to health and food. This course will provide awareness of the impact of some factors such as social class, generation, economy, environment, etc. on food/health related global challenges. Students will explore global issues such as food sustainability/food security/food safety, as well as health-related global issues within the context of their political, economic, social and environmental components. Current hot topics such as genetically modified foods, epidemics (outbreaks) and their social effects will be also discussed.

GLB 202 “Immigration and Population” (Credit 3, ECTS 4)

This course is intended to improve the participating students’ knowledge, awareness and problem solving abilities on topics related with immigration and population. The course is designed as a multi-disciplinary one. The instructors, assistants and students are coming from diverse academic backgrounds; which is expected to produce interesting and thought-provoking outputs by the end of the semester. Having this fruitful human resource in hand, wide range of activities will be done during the semester. In line with AGU’s mission of integrating teaching, research and social impact this course aims to provide a strong theoretical basis on immigration, promote students for conducting an original research which aims to solve problems associated with immigration in their immediate surroundings. Structural determinants of tolerance against immigrants in Kayseri, economy of population development and migration, the impact of diasporas on host and home communities are some of the contents that are going to be covered in the classes.

GLB 301 “Sustainability” (Credit 3, ECTS 4)

Description: This course provides fundamental knowledge and skills for the issues of sustainable development through several projects which are supposed to cover three different but interrelated aspects of sustainability: environmental, economic and socio-political. As such, it aims to increase the students’ awareness of the major issues referred by the sustainable development literature and provide them with the fundamental skills to develop solutions to such issues. Another goal of this course is to make students engage with the group-based study and learning.