Annual Teaching Meeting
Today we (in the School of Computer Science) had our annual Teaching Meeting. This is a tradition that I’m particularly proud of, and not only because I (jointly with Jeannette Wing) started it about 7 or 8 years ago (though that doesn’t hurt ;-), but because it is a great demonstration of the commitment of SCS to good education and to accomplishing it via good teamwork.
In a nutshell, the entire faculty for the School gather together for a half-day conference. The morning is taken up with several presentations, giving the “State of the Education Programs”. This year, we had presentations from
- Klaus Sutner, on the state of the undergraduate CS programs,
- Bob Harper, on the activities of the Undergraduate Review Committee, and
- Bob Frederking, on the current state of the graduate programs.
After the presentations, we have a big conference. The School has over 200 courses on the books, over about a dozen or so areas such as computer systems, AI, machine learning, theory, etc. For each area, a big poster is printed, showing nominal assignments of teachers to each course over the next three academic years. Each poster has a faculty member assigned as an “area coordinator”. And then everyone runs around, negotiating their teaching assignments for the next three years. This means using Sharpies to fill in blanks, cross off old assignments and make new ones, and so on. It’s really a wonderful system, filled with energy and done in the spirit of cooperation.
On the surface, it might seem silly to rewrite a three-year teaching plan every year, but this has the effect of lightening the load and making sure that, every year, we have a good starting point for the planning work.
The presentations are also very interesting and generate a lot of good discussion. A lot of data is presented. In the undergraduate CS program, applications are up again. In fact, we are fast approaching the kinds of numbers we saw at the peak of the dot-com boom. Happily, the number of women applying is also up nicely. Roughly speaking for every freshman CS student we enroll, more than 20 people apply. Very good news.
In the graduate programs, we are seeing steady numbers. This year, over 1,600 applications, spanning the Ph.D. programs in SCS. The Computer Science Program gets just under half of these, and is seeing roughly steady numbers this year. In some areas, like Machine Learning and also in Robotics, we are seeing huge increases. In Robotics, some of this is likely the great press coverage we received from the DARPA Urban Challenge. In Machine Learning, the power of data mining, search, and other large-scale data analysis in both science and industry is surely creating a huge draw.
All in all, things look very good, and the Teaching Meeting was, as far as I could tell, a great success again this year.
Peter Lee @ January 25, 2008