Please do your best in the 4 credit hours of class.
Scribble notes during your professor’s lecture.
Take quizzes, midterm exams, and final exams.
Repeat with the other three 4-credit hour classes that semester until you have completed 120 credit hours in 4 years and earned your bachelor’s degree.
But what if you don’t do all that?
What if we tweaked and reconfigured and changed? What if we reimagined what higher education looks like?
This is what a team at Grand Canyon University’s School of Engineering and Technology is working on.
“Higher education must be completely reinvented,” he said. Dr. Isaac ArtziAssociate Professor and Program Chair of Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, and Game Development. “The model where we give a lecture, students do their homework and then there are exams is still being used, and it has nothing to do with what’s happening in the workplace.
“Our mission is to educate students and equip them with the skills to succeed immediately after graduation. That’s why we’re reimagining the classroom to be like the workplace.”
The university is preparing to launch two pilot 16-credit-hour project-based megacourses in machine learning and autonomous AI cyber defense in the fall, upending the traditional model of higher education.
Essentially, this idea – an initiative advanced by the Assistant Dean of the Faculty of Technology. Dr. Robert Roy Artzi – One mega course that replaces four classes, where teams of students work on immersive projects using industry specifications for over 30 hours a week as if they were working.
They do daily stand-ups, present to leadership, defend decisions, and address priorities, schedules, and budgets.
They don’t take homework or exams. They don’t listen to lectures; the professor is there as a life coach, sounding board, and mentor. And, instead of a final exam, students will submit a completed project and the final assessment will be an interview-style defense.
“We are challenging the old model where concepts are taught in silos and students are expected to connect them later,” Roy said.
Instead, “they work on projects that cover multiple skills across multiple courses,” Artzi added.
Students are given a 30- to 40-page requirements document that tells them, “You need to build this. …When you’re ready, this product should do this.”
They need to apply project-based learning theory to analyze the task and ask themselves, “What do I know? What do I need to learn?”
“Okay, you’re in charge of this. We’re going to learn this. … Ultimately, the whole team is responsible for delivering the product.”
Student staff in the Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality Lab are in the early stages of helping realize that vision.
mason lowneswho graduated in the spring with a degree in computer science, and Christopher Lucianoa senior computer science major, is creating a self-study guide for students taking a 16-credit hour machine learning course.
They’re also a kind of mini-focus group for Artzi. “If you were a student in this class, I would ask, “What would you expect from the learning environment?”
The resources they are building will replace the textbooks, instructors, and labs that students typically use as resources in traditional college courses.
“(Course) Project is project-based learning, so it’s a guided self-study environment where students learn everything they need to learn to complete the project,” Artzi said. “Students learn on their own.”
Lones clicks on the computer and brings up the learning module he and Luciano are working on. Each module includes lessons, activities, and coding challenges. Learning Resources tracks the number of lessons and exercises students complete and the number of badges they earn.
This guide will be the go-to supplemental resource for Machine Learning Mega Course students to use when they feel they need further reinforcement.
We are challenging the old model of teaching concepts in silos and expecting students to connect them later.
Dr. Robert Roy
Faculty of Engineering Assistant Dean
“The goal is that students will use this instead of Google or AI,” Lohnes said.
“I can confidently say that most classes don’t use those resources,” Rones added. But in this case, where students teach themselves, “…this is helpful. If it’s something that I’m learning, that I’m gaining insight into the topic, that’s really important.”
“I feel like there aren’t a lot of resources to do that.”
The vision is to eventually launch an AI assistant that provides all the information students need, Artzi said, adding, “Unlike textbooks that are at most two years old by the time they reach the students, this textbook will always remain fresh. It will be updated with every new development, which means it will always be up to date with all the latest versions related to that particular project or field.”
What Artzi likes about the projects underway in the AI/VR Lab is that “we can do really cutting-edge things. We can build cutting-edge technology and tools in-house with our students. It’s an untapped resource with endless possibilities, given the time and resources.”
These 16 credit hour pilot courses will lead to something much bigger.
Students can take just one of these courses, earn a professional qualification (often a certificate required to work in a specific technical job), and start working in the industry. Alternatively, you can stack these 16 credit hour courses (two required and three electives). In addition to earning 40 hours of general education credits, you can earn a bachelor’s degree.
The initiative is “a huge shift in thinking,” Artzi said.
The concept isn’t entirely new – it’s called microdegrees, certificate courses, bootcamps, etc. – but what’s new here is that it replaces the traditional classroom environment.
“This is where we really want to reimagine higher education and make the classroom more like the workplace. … You can’t train them (students) in something that doesn’t resemble a working environment.”
Roy said that while the idea may be met with pushback, “some people will say this is what higher education should have been doing all along.
“The bigger problem is this: We keep telling students that they need experience to get experience. Maybe the degree itself should solve that problem.”
Lana Sweeten-Shults, Manager of Internal Communications, can be reached at: [email protected].
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