Sunday, September 30, 2012

Suggestion of Separate Tracks for Teaching and Research by US Academics

Last updated on: 2nd October 2012

Is it time to have two separate tracks for teaching and research in academia (higher education)?

It seems that some faculty in the USA are talking about separation of teaching and research:

1) A tech. view from Georgia Tech., one of the top US research universities in science and technology here: http://www.gatech.edu/vision/big-ideas/separate-faculty-tracks-for-teaching-research.

2) A humanities view from a Columbia University Professor Emeritus, Herbert Gans here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/herbert-gans/separate-research-and-tea_b_844575.html.

I could be wrong but I think that really seems to be the future for higher education in these times of economic uncertainty worldwide. The online education movement may push strongly for this separation.

In the case of CS and IT graduate/post-graduate degrees (e.g. B.Tech., M.Tech.) where, I presume, there is supposed to be substantial focus on teaching software design and development, excellence in teaching these topics should naturally go hand-in-hand with software contributions - if the teacher of these topics does not practice software engineering/development himself/herself how can he/she be an excellent teacher of software engineering? And what better measure of a teacher's excellence in the practice of software development/engineering than his/her software contribution record?

In my references above to software engineering I mean the actual practice of software design and development which includes, as a small part, study of various software development processes. Sometimes the software engineering subject is considered to be limited to study of software development processes which I think is a big mistake. Such limited view of the subject should be called software engineering process(es) and not software engineering.

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