Criticism of undergrad curricula justified

By Peter J. Denning

(The following is the condensed version of a statement Denning made at a recent National Science Foundation hearing on undergraduate education in computer science and engineering. To request the full text of Denning's comments, send e-mail to jbass@cra.org.)

By all accounts, undergraduate education in computer science and engineering (CS&E) is flourishing. There are 154 CS&E departments in the United States that grant Ph.D. degrees and several times that number that grant B.S. degrees. Enrollments have been steady or increasing for the past several years, as public interest in computing has increased with the explosion of the Internet, World Wide Web, computational science and information-based engineering.

There is strong agreement on the basics, the core of the discipline, as registered in the 1989 ACM/IEEE report Computing as a Discipline and incorporated into the guidelines of the Computer Science Accreditation Board.

We share a growing concern for cooperation with industry, reflected in our growing use of senior design projects and the 1994 call to CS Department chairs for faculty to spend at least a year in industry as a condition of tenure.

We responded well to the 1994 National Research Council report Computing the Future, which called for more attention to be paid to the undergraduate curriculum. For example, we are getting better at offering an "introduction to computing," where we are developing a new view of computation based on interactions with machines rather than programming.

In the lower divisions, we are beginning to employ undergraduate teaching assistants to provide supplemental instruction and help for peers, lessening failure rates and increasing retention without decreasing faculty involvement. We are including more team projects, more student presentations and more written reports.

After a slow start, we are now responding in numbers to cross-disciplinary work, especially in computational science, biotechnology, quantum computing, information retrieval in the humanities and graphics for the arts. We are making good use of educational technologies such as Lotus Notes, interactive TV, CD-ROM, class Web pages, Internet searching, computer-based lab projects, simulations and workbenches.

We are engaged in lively debates on how much to increase instruction in basic systems integration and how to teach students to design for human concerns, debates whose outcomes can only have positive effects on curricula.

Remaining trouble spots

I mark the 1988 publication of Charles Sykes's best seller, ProfScam, as the beginning of the modern art of university bashing. A dozen or so additional books and innumerable editorials have since appeared on the same subject. The principal complaints include:

• faculty are more interested in research than in teaching,
• graduates lack competence in their fields,
• tuitions and costs are rising faster than inflation without a corresponding increase in value,
• faculty spend too little time in the classroom and
• faculty hide behind tenure and academic freedom rather than address problems.

These writers clearly struck a resonant chord. Not only have their works been best sellers, but the tune has resounded in state legislatures, produced sharp cuts in higher education and the federal research budget, and produced new laws that attempt to bring faculty and their administrations to account for their reluctance to address well-known problems.

These criticisms add up to customer dissatisfaction with universities on a massive scale. Many faculty do not like the notion that students, parents and employers are their customers--but they are, and their discontent is being felt. The successes, improvements and innovations I listed earlier demonstrate real progress.

If we make an honest report card for ourselves, we can see we have a way to go before we will win back the full confidence and loyalty of our customers. Of the complaints listed above, the first three remain as trouble spots:

1. Research. University research is a big enterprise seen by most faculty as integral to the mission of a university. For promotions and tenure, faculty still place more emphasis on research than on any other factor. Few undergraduate students come into contact with faculty research. The complaint that students learn more about advanced technologies from the Discovery Channel than from their professors has considerable merit.

We can go a long way toward resolving this problem by finding ways to connect research to undergraduate curriculum. Some of these ways will involve technologies that facilitate the feedback path from research to curriculum, while others will involve new faculty practices such as organizing technology shows or engaging undergraduate students in their own research projects. The NSF Engineering Directorate took an early lead to change this through its Coordinated Research Curriculum Development program, which has spread to other directorates.

2. Student competence. In response to pointed criticism by business people, we have made good progress with team projects, senior design projects, co-op programs and more emphasis on good presentations and written reports. But few of us can give a cogent answer to the questions: At what must the educated engineers (computer scientists) of the 21st century be competent? How will we know computer scientists are competent?

Few CS&E undergraduate programs have made a clear statement of their promises to students about the kinds of competence they will have on graduation. Fewer still have any means of demonstrating that students are competent. The rising crescendo of calls for certification of software engineers is a reaction to our ineffectual curricula in software engineering and our lack of standards of competence for software engineers. Until we address these questions--in cooperation with business people--we will be forever playing catch-up and responding to pointed criticisms.

3. Tuition. As faculty, we do not pay much attention to reducing the costs of education. We see that as the job of the administrators. When we do think about it, we speak of using information technology to improve communication with students, automate parts of the process such as keeping records or grading, provide more engaging learning environments and reach more students through distance learning. We complain when undergraduate class size reaches 50 students, but seldom consider how to organize to effectively teach 500 students.

The fourth and fifth areas on the list are not real trouble spots in practice. Most faculty I know spend 15 to 20 hours a week on each class: three hours in the classroom, plus many hours preparing, coaching students, grading and giving feedback. Virtually everyone is using e-mail to permit students to have access to them around the clock; faculty accessibility is becoming less of a complaint.

Most criticisms of tenure are actually expressions of frustration about our apparent lack of interest in addressing the real problems of our effectiveness in research, conferring competence and teaching. The growing wave of post-tenure review processes being mandated by state legislatures may render tenure a fond memory in the next decade.

New trouble spots

Two areas to which we are not paying much attention could become trouble spots. I suggest that we pay serious attention to them before they turn into real problems.

1. Demise of the university. Four assumptions lie behind our historical concept of a university: 1) the library, 2) a community of scholars drawing on each other's knowledge in different disciplines, 3) teachers working with small groups of students and 4) a period of schooling that helps transform adolescents into adults and that grants a credential for entering work.

Information technology is undermining these assumptions. First, digital libraries will soon become a reality and make the content and services of libraries available at every desktop. The unique role of a university library will disappear.

Second, as the quantity of scientific records has increased, more scientists have become specialists of increasing depth in narrower fields. The university has divided into specialties in departments and subdepartments. The local community of scholars has been replaced with a global professional community of specialists held together by telephone, fax, Internet and conferences.

The individual professor has become the on-campus representative of the specialist community. Most educational technologies are tools to help the "solo individual" navigate in a complex world of specialties. Few of these technologies promote the kinds of local community that used to characterize the university.

Third, mass education has largely done away with the small undergraduate class. A typical class costs close to $40,000 to produce and often requires 40 students just to break even. Commercial firms are beginning to make education offerings at prices lower than universities, with stronger promises of certifiable competence--for example, Novell network engineer.

A few examples already exist of a master teacher leveraging himself effectively for thousands to tens of thousands of students--for example, Covey's Seven Habits Course. More of this can be expected as entertainment moguls meld their skills with those of flamboyant professors.

Fourth, specialties change so rapidly that most people can expect to change careers every 10 to 20 years during their working lives. It is no longer true that four years of university prepares one for life. This is producing a massive growth of interest in professional education that universities are unable or unwilling to accommodate.

Our immediate response to these threats has been to invest more heavily in information technology at universities. This provides temporary relief but does not change the underlying phenomenon: Information technology is rendering the university obsolete.

What roles can universities fulfill that people would find valuable? How do we begin to position ourselves for these new roles? These are important questions that deserve thoughtful examination. I suspect we are underestimating the speed at which the traditional university is approaching disintegration. I see at least two new roles for the university:

• Professional education. The university can extend its educational offers to cover the 45 years of professional life and not limit its primary focus to the four years immediately preceding professional life. It can offer smaller programs leading to certificates of competence. People will market themselves by an evolving portfolio of certificates rather than as the holder of a B.S., M.S. or Ph.D. degree. These programs can reach into much higher levels of competence than now covered by any university program.
• Community building. The university can be a counterforce against the march of increasing specialization and fragmentation. It can regain its old capacity to foster community involvements, entrepreneurship and solidarity.

These suggestions are painfully brief; my intent is only to point to a direction for future, in-depth investigations.

2. Effective teaching in the age of the Internet. In the last few years, effective teaching has come to occupy a high place in the concerns of every faculty member, as it should. Our notions of teaching are strongly influenced by our notions of learning, which have been heavily imbued with vocabulary from information technology and cognitive science during the past generation.

The customer-relation problems I discussed earlier are not caused by inadequate understanding of learning but by inadequate understanding of teaching. They have been exacerbated by the rapid advances of information technology, which draw attention to the processes of learning.

How many of you as teachers have been offered training (or even forums) in teaching effectiveness at any time in the past five or 10 years? Did you accept the offer?

We as a profession should undertake an investigation of effective teaching in the age of the Internet. I use the phrase "way of the teacher" to describe the attitudes, skills and practices of the effective teacher in this setting.

The way of the teacher asks us to think deeply about who we need to become to be capable of educating people so they are competent in life and work in the 21st century. Before we can say who we must become, we need to understand who we are now. We are specialists who like to congregate with our professional communities. Although we admire or loathe the giants of our industry, we do not move in their circles; we orbit them, not they us.

Many of us feel increasingly disconnected from their world. We see our job as teachers to transmit information to students. We are the authorities who choose what to transmit, verify that it has been received and generate more of it through our research. We do not see students, parents and employers as customers. Only funding agency program managers routinely command such treatment from us.

We focus on the processes of learning and look to cognitive science for laws of learning that we might use to optimize the process and support through information technology. Most of the breakdowns that frustrate us and leave us unsettled are related to this information-oriented way of being.

The way of the teacher begins with a map of the human being, not a schematic of an information-learning process. A new map can rest on premises such as the following:

• We are beings who construct narratives about ourselves and those around us based on our experiences and conversations we have with others.
• We coordinate, communicate and learn in language. Breakdowns--events that interrupt our progress toward our goals--are the moments at which we do most of our learning.
• Learning in the workplace is hardly different from learning elsewhere.
• The Internet is a communication space that vastly enlarges the scope of our discourse and transactions. It also enlarges the number of breakdowns we encounter and the kinds of things we can learn.
• Technology is equipment and tools that augment human capabilities and enrich the space of actions we can take together.
• Design is a conversation we have with others in which we plan and describe technologies that may be implemented and put to practice.

We can build a new way to approach the bases of effective teaching: education, communication, reading, listening, seductive writing, trust, compassion, fear and self-esteem, service, assessment, diversity, seriousness, humor, invention, innovation, historical sensibility, coaching, educational technology, professional education and lifelong learning.

The goal of such an investigation would be a powerful new map showing effective teaching as a set of skills and practices that can be learned, not a gift given to a few select teachers.

Peter J. Denning is associate dean for computing for the School of Information Technology and Engineering at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA.