Convincing Colleges to Upgrade Their Classes?

Pray_4_Mojo asks: "I'm an engineering student at the University of Pittsburgh, and I'm currently taking a required class known as 'Computer Interfacing'. While I enjoy the instructor, I find most of the material to be severely dated. We will spend the majority of the class covering RS232/XMODEM/Token Ring means of computer-to-computer communication. Almost no mention of USB, Firewire, or IRDa is made within the class. I am trying to convince my professor that this material is relevant, as these types of interfaces will be dominate in the world we future grads will be working in. As an example, I demonstrated that the keycard access system to gain access to the Interfacing Lab has a USB port for data download/firmware programming. The professor seems interested, but it seems that I need to convince the department to revise the course requirements. Has anyone attempted to modernize their CS/Engineering program and met with success?"

Comments

Re:The concepts you will learn are the same...

[override11]

Soooo... Go to school for 4 - ? years... to learn the basics in a field, (and go into major debt doing it) then go into real world job, and are told 'forget what you learned in school, this is different'... Its the curriculum model that is antiquated. Its just not practical in many industries that knowledge advances faster than a curriculum can be made. The last thing I'm going to do is go pay to get an education about 5 year old hardware / software that by the time I graduate is not used any more! :P