Peking University, Oct, 22, 2011: The session titled “Curriculum Innovation” of the Global Engineering Deans Council Conference (GEDC) was held at Peking University (PKU) Yingjie Overseas Exchange Center on the afternoon of October 22, 2011.

 

Chair of GEDC, Dr. David Graza-salazar, hosted the session. The lecturers were as follows: Dr. Jaime Bonilla-Rios from the School of Engineering and Information Technologies for Tecnologico de Monterrey at Campus Monterrey, Executive Dean Theo Andrew from Durban University of Technology in South Africa, and Dean Sunil Saigal from the Newark College of Engineering.

 

The deans here mainly focused on the efforts they made of enabling their students in the five-year graduate program to be job-ready ones. They showed examples of difficulties they have faced in the process of curriculum innovation, as well as the ways they solved these problems. The deans also shared with each other more experience in the interaction part.

 

After the session, the journalist from PKU News interviewed Theo Andrew, one of the lecturers.

 

 

Q: You just paid much attention on the infrastructure in your curriculum innovation. Don’t you think the quality of students is more important?

 

A: It all depends on the context you come from, or on the world you live in. In South Africa, we cannot attract enough excellent students, because it’s a problem in the schooling, so that the professors spend most of their time in academic development to get the students well prepared. So in Africa, you need to be a very very good teacher or professor because the schooling is not so good. To answer your question, it’s important to get the students prepared for the university. If you do that, you can have a curriculum that you can do more research.

 

Q: Then what is the role of infrastructure in South Africa?

 

A: In Africa, you have to develop infrastructure. You cannot do research without a technical base. You have to understand society. It is the same situation in a company — take China as an example — you have to understand the local people; if you don’t that, you might force the people to put into the technology, I called that the Technology Imperialism.

 

Q: The last question. To import excellent teachers or to export students to developed countries to study, which is better for you?

 

A: You know, the problem of sending students to a developed country is that they don’t always come back. As for the second problem, it’s very good to invite foreign people to teach here, but only for a very short period of time. Because if they stay too long, the local people would think that “foreigners” occupy their jobs. So you bring them in for a short period of time and then send them back, and invite some others here. I send students to foreign countries as exchange students and not for a very long time. That’s the model I use.

 

Q: That’s reasonable. And thank you for your time. Hope you enjoy yourself in China.

 

A: Thank you.

 

 

Reported by: Bai Bing

Edited by: Arthars