UPDATE: March 10 2020 – Please note that this public lecture has been postponed until further notice. 

Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal. Monday, March 2, 2020 – The University of the West Indies Open Campus will host a public lecture on Monday March 16, 2020 at 6:00 pm in Lecture Room 3 at The UWI Cave Hill Campus.

Mr Ben Nelson, Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Minerva Project will deliver the public lecture entitled “Moving beyond copying ‘best in class’ to defining it; Opportunities for Caribbean education.”

Mr Nelson started Minerva in 2011 with the goal of nurturing critical wisdom for the sake of the world through a systematic and evidence-based approach to learning. Over the past eight years, Mr Nelson has built Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute (KGI), a member of the Claremont University Consortium.

Mr Nelson’s passion for reforming education was first sparked at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he received a B.S. in Economics. After creating a blueprint for curricular reform in his first year, the principles from which he drew to frame Minerva, Nelson went on to become the chair of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education (SCUE).

Prior to Minerva, Nelson spent more than 10 years at Snapfish, where he helped build the company from startup to the world’s largest personal publishing service. With over 42 million transactions across 22 countries, nearly five times greater than its closest competitor, Snapfish is among the top e-commerce services in the world.

“The UWI Open Campus is privileged to have a person of Ben Nelson’s stature to deliver this public lecture,” Dr Luz Longsworth, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the Open Campus stated. “He is a higher education visionary who has a passion for reinventing education and I invite everyone with an interest in education in the Caribbean to attend the lecture and hear Mr Nelson, it will be worth your while.”

About The UWI

For the past 70 years The University of the West Indies (The UWI) has provided service and leadership to the Caribbean region and wider world. The UWI has evolved from a university college of London in Jamaica with 33 medical students in 1948 to an internationally respected, regional university with near 50,000 students and five campuses: Mona in Jamaica, St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago, Cave Hill in Barbados, Five Islands in Antigua and Barbuda, and an Open Campus. As part of its robust globalization agenda, The UWI has established partnering centres with universities in North America, Asia, and Africa such as the State University of New York (SUNY)-UWI Center for Leadership and Sustainable Development, the UWI-China Institute of Information Technology, the University of Lagos (UNILAG)-UWI Institute of African and Diaspora Studies and the Institute for Global African Affairs with the University of Johannesburg (UJ). The UWI offers over 800 certificate, diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate degree options in Food & Agriculture, Engineering, Humanities & Education, Law, Medical Sciences, Science & Technology, Social Sciences and Sport. 

As the region’s premier research academy, The UWI’s foremost objective is driving the growth and development of the regional economy. Times Higher Education (THE) has ranked The UWI among the top 1,258 universities in world for 2019, and the 40 best universities in its Latin America Rankings for 2018. It was the only Caribbean-based University to make the prestigious lists. For more, visit www.uwi.edu.