Bring agility to a slow-moving curriculum with intersessions

As a professor of accounting, I’ve watched the standards governing my discipline change faster than most curricula can keep up with.

IFRS updates, ESG reporting frameworks and AI-enabled audit systems are continually reshaping professional practice. Emerging technologies and practices can develop within months, while formal curriculum development takes much longer. Universities need complementary ways to respond more quickly.

Accounting isn’t alone in this respect. Universities are grappling with the same challenges across various disciplines. Our aim is to internationalise student experience, embed ethics and responsibility into teaching, and prepare graduates for an AI-charged economy. Similarly, employers want graduates who are able to adapt and work confidently across different contexts.

The tough question is how to turn all of this ambition into something that students can experience, without having to continually redesign the entire curriculum.

At my university, we began to find our answers with just 18 students.

Start small enough to experiment

The starting point was the introduction of an intensive intersession as a pilot: a short, focused academic period sitting within the wider university calendar.

At the time, we weren’t trying to reinvent university education – but simply wanted to test something more practical: could an intensive period of teaching and learning give us space to experiment with subjects and approaches that were harder to accommodate within a conventional semester?

The answer from those first 18 students was encouraging. Engagement was high, and faculty found the format creatively liberating. We’d created a space where a different kind of teaching could happen, without undermining the depth and structure of the regular semester.

So we did it again. And then we expanded it.

Today, we run intersessions across multiple schools and disciplines during three dedicated periods each academic year: January, May and August. Each is an intensive 10-day learning experience, and participation has grown from that original cohort of 18 to close to 600 students a year.

As fascinating as watching the numbers tick up has been, for me, as the programme’s coordinator, the most interesting part of that journey has been watching an experiment become part of the institution.

• Three ways professional certifications can boost student outcomes
• How can accounting educators cultivate highly sought-after graduates?
• How to implement experiential learning into accounting education

What began as something the business school owned morphed into something other schools could adapt to their own needs. Different faculties brought different subjects and pedagogical priorities to a common structure. Gradually, the intersession has stopped feeling like a pilot running alongside the university and has become part of how the university itself operates.

Create somewhere the curriculum can move faster

The real value of an intersession is that it creates an agile layer within the curriculum.

Emerging subjects can be introduced, tested and refined, without necessarily waiting for a full curriculum review. That is particularly useful when the subject itself refuses to stand still.

Artificial intelligence is an obvious example. AI isn’t a stable body of knowledge that we can neatly capture in a syllabus and revisit several years later. The tools change. Their applications change. The ethical questions change.

In accounting, the implications for audit, financial reporting and internal controls are evolving particularly quickly. The same is true of fintech, sustainability and other emerging areas across business education.

An intersession gives faculty room to respond to those developments while they are still current. New material can be piloted, feedback gathered and the approach refined. If something works, there is then evidence to support its wider development. That is very different from innovation existing only in a strategy document.

Use intensity to create focus

Another advantage that has become clearer as our programme has developed: intensity can create focus.

During an intersession students concentrate on one subject at a time, rather than switching repeatedly between several courses. This opens possibilities for projects, industry-linked assignments, case discussions and other forms of applied learning.

Clearly, a 10-day course can’t simply be a semester course squeezed into 10 days. Designing for an intensive format results in choices about what really matters to students and how best to get them there. 

When it works, this concentration strengthens the connection between theory and application. It can also open up internationalisation to students who might never participate in conventional mobility programmes. International faculty and practitioners, globally focused content and virtual collaboration can all be incorporated without students having to spend a semester overseas.

Don’t mistake speed for lower standards

The danger is assuming that because intersessions are shorter, they are somehow easier to deliver. Our experience suggests the opposite.

As the programme has expanded, we’ve continued thinking about programme design, faculty onboarding and quality assurance. Faculty need freedom to innovate and institutional support. If intensive teaching is viewed as an optional extra, rather than being recognised through workload planning and performance processes, enthusiasm for the process will eventually suffer.

Academic rigour also requires deliberate protection. Contact hours, cognitive load, learning outcomes and assessment methods all have to work within this intensive format. Students need enough of a challenge to make the experience academically worthwhile, without being overwhelmed by material that has been designed for a completely different timetable.

Compressing time can’t mean compressing standards. This has been one of the most important lessons from scaling the model.

Add agility rather than replacing what works

Today, I don’t see intersessions as an argument against the traditional semester.

Universities need the depth, continuity and intellectual development that semester-long study provides. There are subjects and learning experiences that simply cannot, and should not, be compressed.

But conventional structures were not designed to respond quickly to every emerging professional, technological or societal development. The two formats can therefore do different jobs: depth through the semester, and responsiveness through the intersession. A combination like this gives universities somewhere to experiment without turning their entire curriculum into a permanent experiment.

As business schools navigate AI, changing employer expectations, new forms of work and increasingly complex global challenges, we will continue to hear calls for universities to become more agile. But agility isn’t just achieved by putting the word into another strategy. Sometimes it starts far more modestly, finding a space in the academic calendar where an idea can be tried, learning from what happens, and being prepared to expand it when it works.

Our own experience began with 18 students. The most important thing was giving the experiment somewhere to begin.

Harit Satt is associate dean and intersession coordinator at the School of Business Administration at Al Akhawayn University.

If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.