All Answers: Re: [pakgrid] How the Higher Ed community needs to adapt, and quickly

Tuesday 27 November 2012

Re: [pakgrid] How the Higher Ed community needs to adapt, and quickly

Dear Affan,

I had lengthy discussions with FAST-NU decision makers on this subject a few months back but did not make much headway. However, luckily I used Algorithms course from Stanford at SEECS, NUST and now thanks to management of Air University I am teaching "small Networks: Friends, Money, and Bytes" https://www.coursera.org/course/friendsmoneybytes from Princeton at AU. I am teaching it as a graduate level course. I replay lectures from the course in class. Sometimes I have to give additional lectures to prepare students with background material. I stop the lecture in the middle and explain concepts if needed. We do the same home-works and quizzes in class. We have not reached the point where students listen to lectures before the class and then class is used for solving problems and discussing what students can not understand, but this is a start. I asked students if they wanted me to make slides myself from Princeton video lectures and deliver my version. Students are quite happy with original video lectures from Princeton. Similarly, in my information coding course I used material from Udacity's course on statistics to teach students Bayesian analysis. I gave homework from udacity course and told students that they can copy the solution as long as they understand it. This homework was followed by an in class quiz. My expectation is that students will start self learning process from these courses.

I have given graduate students a list of 6 courses from udacity and coursera with the offer that if they bring completion certificates I will guide them in selecting their MS thesis problem.

The change we need is not likely to come from "Rector's office". They just don't want to go through the effort needed for the change. Why should they? List of applicants to 1st semester is 4 to 5 times the number of seats, university keeps increasing tuition and fee to keep its operations profitable, demand for cs graduates worldwide is increasing. Why rock the boat when everything is calm?

I would recommend that as a start you start using course material from these courses and force students you are advising for MS or Ph. D. theses to take relevant courses. I also think that industry can play a big role here by giving preference to candidates who bring completion certificates from relevant courses on coursera, udacity, MITx, Berkeleyx etc. This will get student's attention.

With Regards
Qasim
pk.linkedin.com/pub/qasim-sheikh/0/250/712
+923008540838 (mob)

From: Affan S <affan.syed.usc@gmail.com>
To: pakgrid@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2012 5:25 PM
Subject: [pakgrid] How the Higher Ed community needs to adapt, and quickly

Dear all,
Since the start of the coursera and then the Udacity experiment, I have been extremely vocal at my institution (FAST-NU) to consider how this new paradigm on MOOC's will affect us. Here is an amazing article that is making the case that we might be like the newspaper industry that new that the digital age was coming but was lazy not to adapt in time and caused several great papers to collapse.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the-academy/

My favorite quote from the article is "First, the people running the old system don't notice the change. When they do, they assume it's minor. Then that it's a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they've squandered most of the time they had to adapt."

So true, and we (the people in higher education) need to be able to adapt to this vision and brainstorm solutions. Lets not play catch-the-west here, for once we are at an even keel with them and can ourselves generate a new paradigm.

Affan

http://www.isb.nu.edu.pk/affan/