New Curricula for a New Way of Teaching 95

New Curricula for a New Way of Teaching 95 were no faculty located at this campus, since Carnegie Mellon is in Pittsburgh. I took this as an opportunity, not as a problem, since fac- ulty want to teach the way they always have taught. Lecturing is easy and faculty like to do it. Students have learned to cope with lectur- ing and later cramming for tests, so no one complains much. No one learns much from this, but no one seems to be too concerned about it. I was asked to design master’s degree programs in computer sci- ence. It seemed to me that students entered a master’s degree program because they wanted to get a good job after graduation, so I asked what jobs they were preparing for as I looked at each Pittsburgh cam- pus program. Even though the faculty in Pittsburgh had been teach- ing these master’s degree programs for years, faculty members were surprisingly unconcerned with what students did after graduation. They just taught their courses, their specialties actually, and assumed the students would find value in them. This seemed an odd state of affairs to anyone who looked at it from the outside, but as professor I know that faculty are rarely concerned with master’s degree students at all and naturally wouldn’t have given these programs that much thought. There was a great deal of hostility to the SCCs that were built by my team and me. They were seen as threatening the existing structure of courses and lectures. Nevertheless, the students liked them a great deal and the people who mentored in them, after some initial resis- tance, began to like them and promote them. This happened in the areas of software engineering and software development. The faculty in e-business liked what we had built so much that they got rid of the existing course-based, e-business master’s degree they had offered in Pittsburgh and now offer only the SCC version on the main CMU campus. SCCs work and work well. Students learn actual skills and teach- ers feel like they are helping students do something real. But faculty, who are used to the old classroom-style method, often resist doing the hard work now required of them. This is true for students as well. One mentor in the West Coast e-business program who himself had gradu- ated from the Pittsburgh classroom-based program said that he felt sorry for the kids on the West Coast campus because they had to work so hard. He noted that they were learning a lot more than he did but that he had liked sitting in the back of the classroom and ignoring the teacher. It was much easier and he had done well at that. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023841