【辉太郎杀G大队】8/8作业by Aliciasun

AliciaSunUID: 2660743

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: 683
TIME: 00:58:23
DATE: 8/9/2009 23:02:57

Along with the soaring development of information in the contemporary era, the faculties in college and universities have been required to assimilate the pragmatic experience in the respective professions which are relevant to the courses they teach, to help improve the quality of instruction and educations. Basically, I agree that this action can benefit the connection between academic knowledge and the practical world outside; however, there are also exceptions on the extreme statement that all faculties have to do this.

First of all, the current era background has entered the situation that knowledge is updated more and more quickly, and thus spending time to explore and trace the latest information is contemporary. On one hand, much different than before, many new prevailing industries progress much more quick than people can expect. Taking storage technology for information as an example, 10 years ago we were still using 3.5 inches floppy disk to save a file with the maximum 10M content, however, today, 800G or even larger hard drive can easily help people record whatever they want to save. In this case, teachers in this area undoubtedly need track the daily updated knowledge to give students better education. On the other hand, academic disciplines have become so specialized in recent years and the previous knowledge has been more easily questioned and even rejected with new theory with the support of wider scope of research. If the college and university faculty still bog down the dogmatical knowledge which was raised many years ago, it will possibly be proved that there are deviations or even fallacies between the old knowledge and truth. Therefore, tracking the latest information will help reduce the defects and errors in the anterior knowledge so as to improve the education quality.

Moreover, from the perspective of participants of education, both the teachers and students will benefit from the faculty's working outside of the academic world in their professions. For teachers, associating the academic knowledge and the practical experience can help establish a better instruction system in their area, and thus they can provide more persuasive illustrates in their courses. There is a saying in Chinese: Practice is the only rule to verify the theory. No matter how the aerodynamic sounds reasonable, without the illustration with planes, it would be non-sense for this world. Also, without the delivery of a software product, whatever it is utilized for, the complex programming principles would not be accepted by students. Thus, in many professions, especially engineering, spending time to work outside of academic to implement the academic to practice is of vital significance to better the quality of instruction. For students, as another part of the education system, by absorbing the practice experience from their tutors or professors, they will understand the academic knowledge more efficiently and give better response, then a positive and mutual communication circle will emerge.

However, it is too hasty to draw the conclusion that all faculty have to spend time on outside practice, because same as other realm, education has its own division and not all these divisions are for future practical use. In some basic science courses, the task of education is to distribute the fundamental principles to students. For example, basic physics is just to impart the axioms and principles of Newton mechanics, relativism and so forth. Also in some social science, like art or history, most of the professors focus on the theory research and the practical working outside these areas will not benefit too much in the instruction quality. Hence, in these kinds of subjects, spending time working outside is optional but not a must to do.

To sum up, roughly classification can be made concerning the efficiency of the outside working. For the subjects in which the practical experience can help elaborate and illustrate the academic knowledge, the faculty of college and university are suggested to perform apposite outside working to make their instruction more credible. For other subjects which should be focused on the basic principles or theories, this action is not extremely acquired, however, the deepen concentration maybe a better way to approach the education quality.