NCU’s educational goals are to “pursue academic excellence, further human welfare, integrate liberal arts with expertise, cultivate leadership talent, pioneer in advanced fields, and join the ranks of top universities” In order to foster talent for leadership who master both liberal arts and expertise, NCU has developed a comprehensive education of liberal arts in addition to specialized academic skills. By integrating expertise into liberal arts, we hope to cultivate the students into sincere, honest, knowledgeable, and visionary world citizens who could apply knowledge to practice and pursue both professional proficiency and moral integrity. Concerning the objectives for common courses and liberal education, NCU takes both expertise and humanity attainment into account. The university has been actively promoting the programs of the Chinese language, foreign languages, liberal arts, and physical education and has integrated the professional programs of each department and each college. By doing so, NCU combines professional skills with liberal cultivation and balances the two elements; furthermore, it expects to guide students to make sports a habit. The students and faculty of NCU not only focus on the pursuit of academic specialties and interdisciplinary collaboration but also emphasize the development of individuals’ sensibility, sense, concern for, understanding of, and participation in the country and society. Other than strong professional skills, NCU graduates also have an attitude towards a life that pursues truth, goodness, and beauty. They can independently think over, analyze, and criticize all sorts of knowledge they have received. Their understanding of human society and culture has reached a certain level. They have managed to grasp their culture and the historical progress of the overall human civilization. Hence, they can promote the traditions of their cultures and advocate local values; they also have grand global vision and the professional abilities to innovate and compete.
Driven by NCU’s vision of becoming a “world-class university with deep humanistic concerns,” powered by NCU’s educational objectives of “integrating liberal arts with expertise,” “cultivating leadership talent,” “leading the innovation of knowledge,” “pursuing academic excellence,” “sustaining social development,” and “furthering human welfare,” and guided by the principles of “student-centric education” and “integration of liberal arts and expertise,” the OTC endeavors to develop the curricula of common courses and liberal education and select each department’s and each college’s featured courses to be part of the program of liberal arts in order to increase students’ interdisciplinary knowledge, enhance their mastery of languages and expressing skills, strengthen their self-directed learning, and broaden their understanding of cultural diversity. The OTC expects to gradually attain the goals of a liberal education—to cultivate “generalist elites.” The OTC also established a course selection system of physical education interest courses to guide students to make sports a habit and facilitate the development of their bodies, minds, and intelligence. The OTC’s educational objectives are, therefore, established to be “cultivating talent who have multiple intelligences, knowledge of liberal arts, logical and critical thinking, communication and expressing skills, grand vision, and concern for society.”
Each teaching unit and each supporting unit subordinate to the OTC have been adjusting, innovating, and reforming the structures of the liberal arts courses and common courses in recent years. We expect that these courses optimized by the OTC and the professional courses offered by each department and each institute could complement each other so that the educational objectives of the OTC could be attained.
