Irene Ly, a junior majoring in psychology, is The Hatchet’s contributing opinions editor.

Many of us have come to class on time only to spend the first 15 minutes or so talking about current events. Professors sometimes lead short discussions before returning to lesson plans as usual, when something big comes up in the news.

But at Bennington College, students have the opportunity to take “pop-up courses,” which are one to two credit courses that last a few weeks and revolve around current world events. Students in those classes get to study these events as they unfold and develop. Just this semester, Bennington College President Mariko Silver co-taught a pop-up course called “Election 2016 and What Comes After.” The course began the week of the last U.S. presidential debate and met for the final time on election night.

GW should experiment with pop-up courses, since it is an institution that likes to emphasize a hands-on, real-world approach to education by using D.C. as a classroom. Bringing pop-up courses to GW would allow students to directly apply what they learn to what is happening in the world as events develop.

The addition of pop-up courses would also bring other classes’ meeting sessions back to material instead of eating up time with discussions about current events that do not apply to class material.

GW already offers something similar to Columbian College of Arts and Sciences students. Freshmen can take dean’s seminars in specialized topics, like the First Amendment, racism in U.S. history and the role of social media in American society. And as students advance into upper level courses, class topics become more specific, as well. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they will cover current events and issues.

Pop-up courses uniquely acknowledge how rapidly our world changes and allow students and professors to reflect on events as they are happening in a classroom environment, instead of waiting until the following semester to offer a full-length course on a topic. Some current topics may also not work as well if they have to take up a full semester, so the mini-courses give students just enough time to study the topics.

Offering opportunities to take pop-up courses in specialized topics provides students with a platform to understand and engage with the material, as they can still share the same rigor of regular courses by including more in a short amount of time. Besides for class discussions, students in pop-up courses may read academic material and news articles, compare situations to other historical and foreign events and write final papers to demonstrate what they’ve learned. However, pop-up courses must be much more focused due to the limited time frame and leave little room for filler or tangents, making each reading and assignment more integral.

The possibilities for pop-up courses are endless and wouldn’t just benefit students who are studying social sciences. James Madison University’s X-labs have offered pop-ups in 3-D printing and virtual reality. On Halloween, they even offered a one-time class on how to sketch pumpkins with lasers. Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University has also been offering pop-up courses since 2013 in various design topics, though they are not offered for credit and focus more on experimenting with new teaching methods than current events.

Pop-up courses would also give professors low-risk opportunities to try new things, since the classes are short-term. If they realize their experiment did not work well, the class will be over in a few weeks, and they won’t try the same thing again. If they reach positive results though, short-term classes could become full classes in the future.

Of course, implementing pop-up courses at GW would require some trial and error to get them off the ground, like with any new venture. But the nature of pop-up courses lends itself well to such experimentation. In the long run, these short-term courses could change the way we learn so that perhaps in the future, going to class doesn’t always just revolve around listening to lectures on things that happened in the past.

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