Issue50 【7\8\9\10】 7.23(第三次作业)

atreusUID: 2471951

TOPIC: ISSUE50 - "In order to improve the quality of instruction at the college and university level, all faculty should be required to spend time working outside the academic world in professions relevant to the courses they teach."
WORDS: 468          TIME: 00:45:00          DATE: 2008-7-23 16:41:04

Generally speaking, the working experiences acquired outside the academic world by faculty do some help to improve the quality of instruction at the college. But that does not mean all faculty should be involved in the working outside, due to their restricted studying scope and their limited time and energy to deal with both the teaching and work.

Admittedly the content of knowledge and the skill of technology the students acquired at the college should keep pace with the development of the social demand and technical level. If not, it loses the meaning of getting good education at the college for the students. The college and university are the place where provide the students enough knowledge and potent skills to strive for a better life in the future. So some faculty could spend time working outside the academic world in professions relevant to the course they teach, such as participating in company's research program. For example, many enterprises provide such opportunities to the faulty and outstanding students. GE provides water process and wind energy program, Texas Instruments Inc. advocates their Digital Signal Processor application, and so on. The participants will get the up-to-date information about the technical application of their academic research, latter they transmit these valuable things to the students. It is certainly not only beneficial to the students, but also improving the quality of instruction at the college.  

However, the working outside should not expand to all faculty at the college and university, because some faculty need not to spend their time to work outside, they also could contribute to the improvement of instruction quality. First, some faculty mainly focused on the theoretical study, which only runs at the university, whereas the outside the academic have no such job vacancy in the companies. How can imaging the faculty who study the mathematical theory about matrix find a profession relevant to the courses they teach? Moreover, not all companies have their laboratory and research center, except the magnates such as Microsoft and Intel. Another reason lies that the faculty have limited time and energy in teaching and studying. Maybe the professions outside the academic are time-consuming, it doom to affect the quality of instruction. Even if the college require the faculty to spend time working outside, the basic time of the teaching on campus should be ensured at least in prevent of the goldbricker of some faculty. Finally, in the case of the company provide more attractive salary than the college; the faculty would quit their teaching to take the full-time job outside the campus. It brings great loss to the university, not mention to improve the quality of instruction.

In sum, it is helpful to the quality of instruction improvement that faculty work outside the academic world to some extends.Due to some reasons, it is unwise to go that far to require all faculty involving with working outside on the expense of their time.


[ 本帖最后由 atreus 于 2008-7-23 20:01 编辑 ]