All Answers: Re: [pakgrid] Need to invert higher education pyramid in Pakistan

Monday 22 October 2012

Re: [pakgrid] Need to invert higher education pyramid in Pakistan

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Qasim Sheikh <qs358@yahoo.com>
To: Hammad Qureshi <hammad.qureshi@seecs.edu.pk>; arshad.ali <arshad.ali@seecs.edu.pk>
Cc: faculty <faculty@seecs.edu.pk>
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2012 11:13 AM
Subject: Re: [pakgrid] Need to invert higher education pyramid in Pakistan

At Air University I am using https://class.coursera.org/friendsmoneybytes-2012-001/lecture/index from Princeton for graduate level course in network modeling and simulation. This is an undergraduate course at Princeton but the instructor plans to give 10 grand challenge problems. Solving any one of these in the class by students will make it a reasonable graduate level course, by local standards at least. I am not sure if I will be able to go that far but what is really important here is that this course breaks the entrenched practice of teaching network modeling and simulation course on layers 2 and 3 (and may be 4) using NS1, NS2 etc. This course takes the focus to application layer and social networks. This Princeton course does cover layers 4 (TCP) and 3 (IP) as well but pegs this to application layer needs.

Students are excited, unfortunately the class size is uneconomically small, but hopefully this will change in future. At times I have to give introductory lectures on linear programing, game theory, CDMA etc. Even in CDMA lecture there is no time to go into any details of receivers and estimation of interference. I have also given students a list of 6 courses from Coursera and Udacity with the offer that the day they bring completion certificates from these course they can start their MS thesis. These six course are not advanced courses, they include ST101 by Sabestian, programing 101 that teaches building a baby search engine and a web programing course from Udacity, two course on algorithms by Sedgwick on Coursera. I would like to add a good distributed computing course to the list. Once students start their MS thesis they can take specialized courses on game theory, probabilistic graph models, convex optimization etc. as needed.

Point I am trying to make is, this e-learning cloud is opening up immense possibilities and their is no time to waste waiting for senior management to come around, specially for young faculty who have returned with Ph. Ds in last 4 or 5 years. Even the strong limitation of dealing with graduate students with very weak undergraduate education can be alleviated to some degree. At least there is hope of dealing with this issue now.

With Regards
Qasim

92 300 8540838 (mob)

From: Hammad Qureshi <hammad.qureshi@seecs.edu.pk>
To: arshad.ali <arshad.ali@seecs.edu.pk>
Cc: faculty <faculty@seecs.edu.pk>; qs358@yahoo.com
Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2012 10:29 PM
Subject: Re: [pakgrid] Need to invert higher education pyramid in Pakistan

I strongly agree. The courses on Coursera are indeed fantastic. I am learning a lot about teaching going through these courses. I intend to include some content in the next course I teach.

Best Regards,

Dr. Hammad A. Qureshi,
Assistant Professor,
Department of Computing,
NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Tel.: 051 9085 2221

On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 9:51 PM, arshad.ali <arshad.ali@seecs.edu.pk> wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Qasim Sheikh <qs358@yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 12:27 PM
Subject: [pakgrid] Need to invert higher education pyramid in Pakistan
To: "pakgrid@yahoogroups.com" <pakgrid@yahoogroups.com>

It is really exciting to see initiatives taken by Edx, coursera, udacity and others in taking quality higher education to large audience in a very cost effective manner. Unfortunately, entities like HEC, senior management of public and private universities and faculty responsible for this task in Pakistan are enjoying their comfort zone of traditional modes of higher education where quality of education is hardly ever put to a transparent evaluation. Courses being taught on Internet are open to all sorts of open and transparent evaluation.

I feel that industry has a very significant role to play. For example in IT industry, companies could adopt policy of giving hiring preference to fresh graduates and professionals who take relevant online courses from these top universities of the world. PASHA could take a lead in positively encouraging this hiring practice amongst its members and then reaching out to students and giving them this message as they enter undergraduate education. Students should know that knowledge acquired from these world class online courses is as or more important than name of their institution. This change will happen only if industry demands it and students internalize it on industry demand. Management of HEC and universities and faculty may come along if they realize that their current mental model and resulting management and teaching practices are making them irrelevant due to this change brought by technology.

With Regards

Qasim

92 300 8540838 (mob)