| Course | Semester | Class | Top 3 Students | Course Page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Object Oriented Programming Techniques | Summer 2006 | BBA and MBA | M Asif Usman Ahmed Rizwan Asghar |
OOPT Summer 2006 |
| Electronic Commerce | Fall 2006 | BBA MIS 5 | Marya Fazal Nida Anwer Sana Ansari |
E-Commerce Fall 2006 |
| Electronic Commerce | Spring 2008 | BBA MIS 6 | Aamir Ali Tehleel Amin Samar Irshad |
E-Commerce Spring 2008 |
| Electronic Commerce | Spring 2009 | BBA MIS 6 BCS 6 MBA MIS 4 |
-On going- | E-Commerce Spring 2009 |
This was early 2006 when I applied for MBA admission at Institute of Business Administration (IBA) and passed. However the institute would not waive the Post Graduate Diploma (PGD) requirements even for someone with MSIS degree - a degree that included 6 MBA courses from top 15 MBA school of the US. Now that was a turn-off; would anyone waste 18 months to do refreshers at IBA when they have done the actual work at NYU?
One option was to go for PhD; but I was not sure if I would commit for that length. So I applied to teach courses as visiting faculty in the Center for Computer Studies (CCS) where Computer Science and MIS courses were taught.
Summer 2006 was my first teaching experience. The course was Object Oriented Programming Techniques (OOPT) - a 4 credit course for BBA and MBA students. Though I had a wonderful class, many of whom still stay in touch via LinkedIn and Facebook, I realized that BBA students were just not into ‘programming’ and I wasn’t Randy Pausch from The Last Lecture.
Electronic Commerce
So I applied for a course that was a mix of Technology & Business - Electronic Commerce, though I had little hopes to get this highly visible course at such a junior level of teaching. However the stars were on my side and in Fall 2006 I taught my first course of Electronic Commerce.
Back in 2006 Facebook was a small and growing social network open only to university students in the US (none of my students was a member; few knew about it), YouTube was an independent company. MySpace was bought by Fox Interactive Media for $800 Million. Yahoo was a top player.
Fast forward 2 years and Facebook is the largest social network visited by quarter of the world’s internet population and 90% of my students. MySpace is the largest music streaming site. Yahoo is struggling to breath on its own. My Spring 2009 students knew what Amazon Kindle was. We have a Microsoft Student Partner facilitating technical training and students are hosting their own web sites selling research papers to International Markets.
I love teaching this course; the content keeps updating itself; stuff expires before semester ends, unlike courses in Accounting or Marketing where the bulk of the content is applicable even after decades and course slides need not be updated.
Open Teaching Philosophy
All the 50+ university courses I took in the US - 40+ at the University of Texas Austin and 12 at the New York University, I believe all faculty members had their own public web-pages hosted on University servers. These include Faculty Profiles, their research work, past & current course content, industry relationships, etc. This was in late 90s and early 2000s, before the social networks, faculty review sites, content management systems and search engines made the information even more widely available.
In Pakistan however, the system is extremely closed, paper based. There is no open feedback system and content is not shared. From lectures and notices to assignments and attendance, everything is based on paper.
So I have tried to be open. The first two semesters, we collaborated through newsgroups on Yahoo. But that was not flexible, and I decided to use a wiki, blog or a complete content management system next time.
Then for my 2nd time around teaching E-Commerce, I booked the domain www.pkeducation.com, a URL whose virgin availability in 2007 speaks volume about the lack of focus on Electronic Commerce (or education) in Pakistan. It was configured with some widgets and plug-ins that made it easy to share information between me and the students.
I invite faculty all over Pakistan to use this platform - get your blog setup for free (www.pkeducation.com/university/semester/course), become its administrator and start collaborating with your students.