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

Saturday 1 December 2012

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

Dear Affnan,

My graduate course has a very small number of students, so the type of survey you have suggested will be difficult to do. I am trying to teach a similar course next semester to undergraduates. If this happens I might be able to get a bigger sample. Suggestions for survey questions will be very welcome.

As far as your point about research edge is concerned, I could not agree more. In my view, with these sweeping changes, a faculty member deserves salary for two key (rather challenging) activities:

Frequent evaluation (grading) and nurturing feedback to students with help in background material to understand these international quality courses
Solve local problems by first leveraging existing technology and then extending state of the art to give optimal solutions.

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

From: Affan Syed <affan.syed.usc@gmail.com>
To: Qasim Sheikh <qs358@yahoo.com>
Cc: "pakgrid@yahoogroups.com" <pakgrid@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 11:52 AM
Subject: Re: [pakgrid] How the Higher Ed community needs to adapt, and quickly

Dear Dr. Qasim,
I appreciate your thoughts, I have some comments inline below:

On 11/27/2012 8:53 PM, Qasim Sheikh wrote:
> Dear Affan,
> I had lengthy discussions with FAST-NU decision makers on this
> subject a few months back but did not make much headway.

We are making some headway, but I am actually pointing towards a radical
shift in the tautology as well as new delivery mechanisms.

> 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.

The above approach is the one I was thinking is the obvious first step;
It will be great if you can get some structured (and anonymous) feedback
from your students about this experimentation and share the results here
(and perhaps even wider in the MOOC community).
>
> 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.

Again, a great idea... but research is one thing where brick-and-mortar
schools/universities will have an edge.

>
> 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?

But that exactly is the point of my article, We (the current higher Ed
univ.. and to some extent even the primary and secondary level schools)
are the incumbents and there is a disruption that is going to not rock,
but sweep the world from under our feet. Those who can envision this and
adapt (by coming up with novel solutions) will survive.

>
> 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)

Affan