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Ask Slashdot: How To Fix an Outdated College Tech Curriculum?
An anonymous reader writes: As a student, what's the best way to bring change to an outdated college tech curriculum?
The background on this is that I have 15 years of experience in the field and a very healthy amount of industry-recognized training and certifications. I'm merely finishing up my degree to flesh out my resume -- I haven't learned much from the program that I don't already know. However, the program would have benefited me greatly 15 years ago. It's a great program, except for a biometrics class that is absolutely behind the curve. The newest publication on the syllabus is from 2009. This is simply teaching the students outdated and often wrong information.
Additionally, a lot of the material seems like it was stretched to make a full semester class in biometrics in the first place -- most of the material, honestly, could be compressed to about two hours of lecture and still be delivered at a reasonable rate.
What's the best way for a student in my situation to get this fixed so the school stops wasting student's time with outdated and wrong information?
The background on this is that I have 15 years of experience in the field and a very healthy amount of industry-recognized training and certifications. I'm merely finishing up my degree to flesh out my resume -- I haven't learned much from the program that I don't already know. However, the program would have benefited me greatly 15 years ago. It's a great program, except for a biometrics class that is absolutely behind the curve. The newest publication on the syllabus is from 2009. This is simply teaching the students outdated and often wrong information.
Additionally, a lot of the material seems like it was stretched to make a full semester class in biometrics in the first place -- most of the material, honestly, could be compressed to about two hours of lecture and still be delivered at a reasonable rate.
What's the best way for a student in my situation to get this fixed so the school stops wasting student's time with outdated and wrong information?
When I went to college 30 years ago it was clear undergrad studies were a good 10-20 years behind the times. The only up to date things were the textbooks, which got revised every 2-3 years so you couldn't buy used versions of them.
Asimov's "Profession" is one of my favorites. I teach Computer Science at a 4 year university, and my goal is to teach skills that transcend a particular technology/language/API, while at the same time being relevant to current developments. As a student, you are pretty much out of luck, but as an instructor it takes a lot of effort to resolve the tension between timely and timeless content.
The point of college is to learn how to learn.
If you want to learn the latest buzzwords, go to a trade school.
If you want to learn how things used to be done so you can some idea of where to begin learning how modern things build on the "old" stuff, then you go to college. There is very little "old" technology that doesn't continue to drive new technology. Syntax might change but concepts don't. You'd be surprised how old the math is for doing 3D graphics. The issue was that technology wasn't fast enough, not that the concepts weren't fully understood and implemented to some degree.
If you don't see the relevance of "old" concepts in new technology then you're not college material. You're the type of person who just wants to be told what to do and follow directions.
If you're "overqualified" for a degree in Computer Science, then you best option is to choose a different degree program like Math which is generic enough to get past most HR filters in tech companies.
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C is useless for teaching you how to think about programming. C developers are brain-damaged, only able to see things in terms of bytes and structs. Teach lambda calculus, then Lisp, then something more practical -- C/C++ if you must. The fundamental task of the programmer is not to manage bytes, but abstractions. Teach the abstractions first! Going top-down does have a tendency to produce programmers who are wildly ignorant of basic machine functions. This is still better than people who don't think that there's any need for map, reduce, or classes.