How to Design LMS Based Online Examinations in Asynchronous Mode

In medical universities and engineering universities during the 1980s-90s when cheating and copying culture was rampant, faculty members primarily used to rely on viva examinations for awarding final grades. Vivas and presentations even today during on-site classes are preferred for MS thesis, PhD Thesis, capstone projects, final year projects, clinical, lab practicals, and senior design projects at all the universities. For these assessments, viva/presentations are considered to be more effective for grading the students' learning. Students typically submit written reports or progress. For assessors and evaluators, it is more important to understand the extent to which students have digested the contents of the report or their practical experience. The content of assignments and online submissions is only an indicator from which the teacher needs to ascertain what the student actually knows and understands. Vivas and project displays during exhibitions are more effective in determining their depth of understanding. Even in our interviews for admission and employment, we find people with impressive testimonials and CVs. However, their worth and depth is easily revealed in a few minutes of questioning through viva-like interviews.

This post focuses on self-paced, deep learning experience 

How Schools Teach Students to Hate Reading: Mass Creation of Non-Readers

Schools are producing graduates who know how to read but are not readers. They have become non-readers (functional illiterates) because the schools have taught them to hate reading! 

Functional Illiteracy

Schools typically use a curriculum and methodology that consists of senseless and meaningless worksheets and exercises which the students are forced to do repeatedly, continuously and ad-nauseam. And, when they resist, they are punished with F-grades, labeling and humiliation. These meaningless tasks and exercises and their resulting punishments teaches the students to hate reading and convinces them that ALL reading is so tedious, so boring, so frightful and accompanied with so much punishment that it is inconceivable that reading can ever be pleasure and fun. This is how we are producing non-readers, who believe that reading books is unreal, irrelevant, and disconnected with the challenges of life. We are in fact producing functional illiterates. 

Life Long Learning vs Sacrificing Interest
at the Altar of Technique Mechanics

Why Engineering Students are Reluctant to become Entrepreneurs: Role of PEC and Universities

Presented at ICEE-2016, International Conference on Entrepreneurial Engineering: Commercialization of Engineering Projects and Research

There are several reasons why Engineering students in Pakistan have been found to be reluctant to opt for entrepreneurship in their engineering fields as opposed to other disciplines such as Computer Science. These reasons can be classified in five major categories; (i) cultural and family mindset, (ii) demographic pressures (iii) narrow focus of curriculum, (iv) teaching and lab methodology, (v) enabling and facilitation environment.  Pakistan Engineering Council has a major role to play in at least the last three areas. The curriculum design and enforcement of PEC has left no room for subjects that can broaden the vision of the students and open their minds to other areas. The recommended lab methodology is based on the use of trainers and fill-in-the-blank type of submissions that further constrains the work of the students in predetermined directions. The recommended teaching methodology focused on class-room type of work also leaves no room for out-of-the-box exploration of ideas. There is a need for the universities and PEC to join together to provide an enabling and facilitation environment that can help the students. There is a need to diversify the curriculum to other areas by reducing the number of technology intensive areas and more creativity and exploratory courses that can broaden the perspectives. There is a need to adopt new methodologies such as project based learning and problem based learning. The lab work needs to be liberated from the clutches of the trainers. A post graduation apprenticeship or internships in exploring new ideas is necessary for entrepreneurial engineering. 

The Case for Engineering Entrepreneurship

Managing English Teaching Outcomes in Universities: An Experiential Learning Case Study of ESL/EFL

My recollections as Vice President and Dean about ensuring the learning outcomes of English courses at PAF KIET from 2002-2012. 

Around ten to twelve years ago in our academic discussions with the President of the institute where I was working at that time, we would often worry about raising the English skills of our students. President of the Institute was Air Commodore (R) Khalid Husain who hailed from the Engineering Branch of PAF and who had been in senior positions in training and development wing of PAF. One day he mentioned that the new inductees in PAF are mostly from rural areas who have never been to English medium schools, and have had no or little exposure of English speaking environment. However, within a few months of their joining the PAF training academy, they are speaking fluently in English. How can we ensure that students of universities also start talking and writing in English within a few months? We agreed that  there was merit in this expectation, and we need to try to design systems that can ensure a similar level of outcome.

6 Trends that will Determine your Career Success in the 21st Century

There are six major trends that are going to determine the careers of graduates in the 21st century:

1. Shortening of the life cycle of organizations and businesses.
2. From life-long full-time employment to short term, contractual, project-based engagements
3. From teaching to learning
4. From knowledge acquisition to enterprising creativity and innovation
5. From management to leadership. From managed employees to self-driven autonomous decision makers.
6. From choosing a career vision to choosing your purpose

[Based on my Orientation Speech for new students at IoBM on September 5, 2015.]

Mismatch of Curriculum with Realities at Stanford, MIT and other Ivory Towers

From ivory towers to realities 

By Dr Asad Zaman

Published: June 28, 2015

Curriculum Mismatch with Real Life

As MIT freshmen are wont to do, we were up way past midnight discussing big absorbing questions like the meaning of life. We realised that none of us had a clue and decided to ask our professors. A natural candidate was our history professor, who seemed approachable and had engaged us in interesting discussions in class. He gave us an answer which seemed satisfying at the time. He said that we had to learn the basics we were being taught, before we could tackle the big questions. It was many decades later when I realised that we had been swindled. In a classic bait-and-switch manoeuvre, we were tempted with the possibility of learning wisdom and sold an entirely different package.

From Disposable Cups to Throwaway Relationships: Costs of Disposable Culture

Transforming a Disposable Culture

By Dr. Irfan Hyder

Disposable Relationships

The emerging lifestyle of today requires that we restrict ourselves to a small cocoon. We are sold that we should gain expertise in only one particular subject. Our occupations are specialised, limiting our view to a narrowly focused area, and our daily chores revolve around our jobs, which we dutifully report to every day of our lives until the time to leave this world comes. The chimera of “convenience” has made “consumerism” the purpose of our lives, where our only objective is to buy, consume and throw away. It is not important to know how something is produced, nor what feelings, culture and tradition is associated with it. The importance of things is devalued, as we focus only on the short-term utility and not the extensive process of its development and nurturing. We forget that in life, the value of a goal is not just in its final output, but also in the process – the effort, toil and struggle for that goal.

Time Management of Social/Marriage Events in Karachi: A Case Study of How to Create Social and Youth Impact

It was first week of May of 2014 and representatives of Youth Impact came to see me at CBM. I was impressed to meet the team. They talked about the impact that they wanted to create on the youth and through them. They told me about their experiential learning program in which they take the youth for outdoor activities such as hiking, and other tours during which they impart training on leadership, problem solving, thinking skills, time management and other skills using the learning by doing approach. I was already excited about the concept of learning by doing, and had been implementing project based learning, problem based learning and "Experiential Learning" through various interventions described elsewhere in this blog. This had convinced me that our education methodology and our curriculum is totally disconnected from reality and real life problems. This disconnect has created a situation where the only thing on the mind of our graduates is their desire to leave the country (Why ). 

Revamping Business Curriculum in Collaboration with Industry for Impact

The model followed in Pakistan in the design of curricula is basically based on rearrangements of popular course names that correspond to some established (typically foreign) text books. A typical university in Pakistan designs a program by copying and pasting course names from some of the foreign universities and prominent local universities, making a semester-wise list of courses and throwing a few electives for each specialization. In the end the course descriptions end up being summaries of table of contents of selected text books. The final program mainly represents a rehash of the personal experiences of the academics of that university. Some of the universities may also invite a couple of people from industry or other universities to tweak this program in a forum pompously named as Board of Studies, which mainly involves playing with the names of the courses and their rearrangement. When HEC (or PEC) invites a curriculum meeting, it ends up rounding up the usual suspects (using the famous quote from Casablanca) i.e. university professors linked to the discipline. Industry executives and societal representatives are seldom invited/present in such deliberations. Major issues in such meetings revolve around courses, credit hours and the prerequisites. There is neither time nor the energy to go down to the contents of any of the courses.

How to Create Impact on Society: A Case Study of Experiential Learning Intervention in a Course on Social Advocacy

It was around 2007-08, I was chatting with some top decision making executives of five private universities/institutes in Pakistan. As is customary in Pakistan, the discussion invariably turned towards lamenting the sorry state of affairs in Pakistan, how Pakistan is going down the drain and how its situation is increasingly becoming deplorable. After a while, I could take it no longer and was forced to make an outburst that went something like the following:

Of all the people in Pakistan, we who are sitting around this table have no right to blame others for the sorry and dismal state that we find ourselves in! We, gentlemen, are in command of at least 20,000 students in the three major cities of Pakistan and these students often remain with us for at least two to four years. The students of our institutions hail from resourceful families. Our universities have enough resources. We can influence the type of courses that we offer, the content of these course and even the teachers who are conducting these courses. We can even fire or change the teachers. Collectively we are churning out over 4,000 graduates every year who have gone through the process designed and approved by us. Why can't we produce even 400 change agents who can transform the business and societal environment of Pakistan and who can turn the tide of our social deterioration?  

A Formula is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Dijkstra vs Buzan's Mind-Maps

A Formula is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Dijkstra vs Buzan's Mind-Maps

Problems with Pictures with too many details and Complexity

I had the opportunity to attend Tony Buzan's presentation of his famous Mind-Maps at the convention of Management Association of Pakistan held at Karachi in September 2014. Mind-maps became popular in Pakistan some years ago thanks to their use for pictorially representing the concepts in a summary page at the end of each chapter in many of the high school science text books for O/A Level students.  As Buzan was presenting the mind-map concepts, I was comparing them with my experience of graphs and pictorial representations for representing complex concepts, processes and relationships. 

Testing/Grading vs Motivation: A Variation on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for Academics

Testing/Grading vs Motivation: A Variation on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for Academics

Whenever there is a discussion of the performance of students, lack of motivation of students is the most frequent complaint of nearly all the teachers, whether in higher education institutions or in schools, whether today or 20 years ago. Performance of students and hence teachers therefore became my first priority when I started in academic administration nearly two decades ago.

Why Project Based Learning? An Experiential Learning Case Study of Language Teaching

Why Project Based Learning? An Experiential Learning Case Study of Language Teaching

This post describes a major step in my personal journey towards becoming an advocate of PBL approach, which is often referred to as "Learning by Doing" and is part of the "Experiential Learning" landscape. Please note that that the learning through this case study is applicable to all languages and at levels of education as highlighted in some other posts although the experience mentioned here is in the context of programming language issue of a computer science department of a higher education institution. 

Overprotected Kids: Need for Risk Taking and Self Discovery

Overprotected Kids: Need for Risk Taking and Self Discovery

Risk taking used to be part of the every day growing up experience of every child. With our over-protection and over-carefulness we are throttling the innovation, creativity and liveliness of our children. Risk taking and suspense used to make kids mentally strong and develop an ability to work under stress and pressure. Exploring new places, new situations that were often fraught with danger, were actually a preparation to cope with the uncertainties in life. This may very well be one of the reason of the psychological issues confronting many kids and youths today.

How Language Acquisition is Made Difficult for Children: Eight Lessons from an Urdu Acquisition Case Study

How Language Acquisition is Made Difficult for Children: Eight Lessons from an Urdu Acquisition Case Study

[The later part of this post would derive the lessons that I learned from my experience of how I learned Urdu which is described first. These lessons address the problems that our faulty methodologies are creating today in language acquisition especially in teaching of Urdu. The lessons are general and apply to other languages also as highlighted by references to well established and well known research. ]

The first Urdu Book I remember reading around 1966-67 was I think Urdu ki pehli kitab[?]. I must have been around five or six years old at that time. Those were the days when the madness of imprisoning two and three year olds in the pre-school had not begun. (It is madness because nowhere in the developed world any educationist recommends this except schools in Pakistan run by administrators not academics.) I had by then must have gone through the Noorani Quaida. Anyhow, I distinctly remember a few lines from the very first page of that pehli kitab. Surprisingly many others who had started their Urdu from this book also do so. The first page had some very simple rhyming sentences with very short "meaningful" words such as:

Of Jungles, Streams, Berries and Wild Pink Flowers: Costs of Commercialization of Islamabad

Of Jungles, Streams, Berries and Wild Pink Flowers: Fragrant Memories of Islamabad that Was

This December I was in Islamabad. Going through the town brought a pang in my heart as memories of 40-45 years ago came flooding down. Those were the times when kids like us had immense open spaces with wild growth to explore and experience the nature. We used to call such places jungles as there were bushes, shrubs, trees, gorges, creeks, tall grass and all sorts of vegetation, where sighting of snakes, giant lizards, and jackals was common with occasional reports of sightings of even leopards and wild boars. For us that used to be a wonderland where we would go out for wild berries, swimming in the clear natural springs, and trying to relive Tarzan climbing the trees, jumping from one sheesham tree to another and roaming the jungles with bows and arrows like Robin Hood and Little John fighting the obnoxious sheriff of Nottingham.

Problems with Bloom's Taxonomy: Impact on Curriculum and Motivation of Students

Problems with Bloom's Taxonomy: Impact on Curriculum and Motivation of Students

The basic problem with Bloom's taxonomy is defining the learning process as a sequence of progression from simpler memory recall function to the supposedly higher levels such as synthesis and evaluation which as Frank Smith argues below is contrary to the actual process of human learning. The problem is that the theoretical foundations of Bloom's Taxonomy are based on the experiments done (i) on pigeons, rats, and dogs by the founders of behavioral school of Pavlov and Skinner, and (ii) involving "senseless" and "meaningless" tasks. They unfortunately forgot to compare their experimental results with the observations of children learning in real life settings as the seminal work of John Holt, Chomsky and others demonstrate using sensible and meaningful activities. In the excerpt given below, Frank Smith points out the problems with Bloom's taxonomy through various observations of real people in real learning situations that prompted him to say:

Most Effective Way of Cutting a Nation from its History and Ideals - Imposing a Foreign Language

Most Effective Way of Cutting a Nation from its History - Imposing a Foreign Language

The project for cutting a nation from its history and roots always starts with the introduction of a foreign "language". We know how Ataturk's drive for secularism led him to change the Turkish script from Arabic to Latin script to cut the Turks from their history, and we also know how the British used English as a tool to create an elite class more anglophile (more loyal than the king) to serve them during their colonial rule and later to extend their control during the post-colonial era. This elite class identified themselves more with their colonial masters than with their fellow country men as evidenced by the distance they still maintain (see the VVIP culture and the motorcades of our rulers; military, political or feudals). 

How our Curriculum Design (from Simple to Complex) Insults the Intelligence of a Student

[Delivered as L2L Talk on 2011-03-20]

A child is naturally curious and interested in exploring about things that he does not know. Complex and unknown things are the ones that interest him (and us). We are interested in mysteries, conspiracy theories, adventure, drama, and are amused by the unexpected, stupendous, super-natural or sci-fi. We insult a child's intelligence by thinking that he can not understand complex things. We think that the only way to teach him is to progress from simple to complex. First drill in him simple concepts. He will only understand complex concepts, once he has mastered the simple things.

Structural Paradigm of Schools: Foundations and Assumptions

Current Education Paradigm [1]

Schools anywhere in the world share a common paradigm that was determined by the demands of the Industrial Revolution. In this post we identify the structural elements underlying the current paradigm. Many of the underlying assumptions of these structural elements are being questioned in the light of the transition to knowledge age of the 21st century from the industrial age of the 19-20th century. The structural elements given below are also shared by the universities, with some variations: