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Ask Slashdot: How To Fix an Outdated College Tech Curriculum?
An anonymous reader writes: As a student, what's the best way to bring change to an outdated college tech curriculum?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 This is simply teaching the students outdated and often wrong information.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What's the best way for a student in my situation to get this fixed so the school stops wasting student's time with outdated and wrong information?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 This is simply teaching the students outdated and often wrong information.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What's the best way for a student in my situation to get this fixed so the school stops wasting student's time with outdated and wrong information?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.
And bring a check. A very big check. That way the dean might take some of what you say seriously.
Maybe one idea would be to focus on the math (algorithms, combinatorics, etc.) rather than on specific technologies, and perhaps engage the students to improve their quality by either encouraging participation in competitions (like the ACM's) or creating a little in-house business incubator.
Strangely enough, universities are slow to change. This is because every class must fit into a degree. They go through a proposal and review cycle, then have to be approved by advisory boards, administration, and finally the board of regents. They might even be included in a college accreditation process. Once they are in the course catalog, the course must be offered or a student might not get their degree. That means that old classes are like zombies hanging around.
Community colleges change faster. There are similar processes, but fewer people involved.
Vocational high schools or trade schools can offer the content to their students as technology changes. This hinges upon the ability of the instructor to adapt to new technologies over the course of their career. Students in these programs often learn concepts as they become relevant and outperform their college peers. For example, a group of high school juniors from my class competed in the 2018 National Cyber League Spring competition, beating 84.5% of 2 and 4 year college teams.
Having taught at all three levels, I know this from first-hand experience.
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?
I am not a student, but an adjunct faculty member. That said, as an adjunct I have very little official authority when it comes to curriculum matters, but I have managed to find success in updating woefully outdated curriculum. I will share some things based on my experience.
First, I recommend you start by talking with the instructor(s) of the class(es) in question. Request a copy of the master syllabus. This is not the master copy of the syllabus handed out each term, but is actually a specially formatted and fairly detailed documented that describes precisely how the course will meet all of the educational objectives required by the school (and/or any accrediting body). Also get a copy of the course catalog description (you can probably get this yourself from your school catalog online). Also ask the instructor if they are willing to support your effort and advocate for the change before any school personnel or committees involved in the process (as a student you may not be permitted to appear before those personnel or committees to request a curriculum change). Find out if there are minor changes that you can make that satisfy your objective for updating the course without triggering a full academic revision of the course. There may processes in place for smaller changes that require lesser review and approval.
Then, get to work. Update the master syllabus to reflect what you think would be a better course composition, sequence of topics, etc. Ensure that all required school objectives are still being met or exceeded. Provide supporting documentation. That might include attachments that describe academic developments in the field, analyses about emerging new topics that are shaping the field, etc. Throughout the process work closely with the instructor involved. If you are fortunate enough to be able to interact directly with the course director, then you will have fewer layers to go through. If not, the instructor you are working with will need to make a proposal to the course director, probably the department, and either an undergraduate or graduate committee that reviews and approves curriculum changes.
You will need to ensure to get buy in from the instructor involved and/or the course director as appropriate before the matter will come before the right committee. Offer to be a TA for the updated course to help get things off to a good start. Offer to write up lecture notes and slides for the new material, offer to write sample homeworks, projects, quizzes, exams, etc., as appropriate for the subject matter.
You will also need to patient. Keep in mind that for traditional semester schools, Spring registration is already underway (meaning your change would almost certainly not be considered for Spring) and Fall registration will probably open sometime in February or March. That means that if you want to get a course updated for the Fall of next year (which would be the earliest possible update if you started working on it today), you probably only have something like a month to get it all in order. Between Thanksgiving, Christmas/New Year's break, and Spring semester start up, you really don't have a big time window to get the job done, so you would have to hustle to have a chance.
That said, be prepared to wait as well. The committees probably only meet every few months, so you may have to request a special review for something to make it in time for next Fall. That may or may not be feasible depending on your institution and its policies.
I hear plenty of students complain about stuff like this, but I have not yet seen one actually try to tackle the problem rather than just complain about it. Best of luck.
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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Your both wrong. Go and occupy the dean's office, yell and scream at the sky, threaten professor's careers, be irrational, etc. That's how it's done in "studies" programs.
If you need some kind of certification or piece of paper that says you know something, there are plenty of institutions that will let you take an exam, do those. In the end nobody cares where you got the rag, just that you have one if you're just starting out (and often we don't even care about that).
If you have 15 years of experience, why still pound on about your education, just demonstrate that you have kept up with certifications and/or on-the-job education.
Unless you want to break into upper management and need an MBA, there is not much reason to go into full-time school with 15y of experience, in some cases it may even demonstrate the reverse - that you needed an entry level class to get up to speed with current events, that's not a good signal.
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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.