IBA uses new media to Open-Source Education – will it work?
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There is an interesting experiment brewing that you can all be a part of.
Farzal, a senior manager at PixSense and teacher at IBA is preparing to teach a course on E-Commerce Entrepreneurship in Spring 2008.
As an interesting twist – he’s trying to make this course into an industry-wide participative event. Here’s how it works – Anyone from the industry can participate in framing the curriculum and topic-focus of the course, and also provide case studies, examples, tips and thoughts and writing at the course blog: http://ecommerce.pkeducation.com/blog/
That’s right – Anyone can post there.
The aim is for the blog to become a place where the industry can talk directly with the students of that course.
The full message from Farzal after the jump. What do you think though – will this work?
We all have personal interests in seeing “better†talent coming out of universities, especially in relation to IT, and in general, related to entrepreneurship. IT entrepreneurship is very close to heart for all of us, and several of us have written about it on our blogs and talked about it in media/universities. So this is one chance we have to get some of our ideas and wish-list across to come of the brightest students.
Please help me in framing the curriculum for this course. I’ve setup a blog for this where anyone can post as author:
http://ecommerce.pkeducation
.com/blog/ The ‘files’ page has an attachment to subjects list discussed in previous course. I’ve also listed the course definition & technical subjects these students have gone through.
Visits by industry professionals, an e-commerce venture with focus on business plan and funding along with basic implementation, and many other things can be covered. So please give your input.
The blog is open for everyone to be an author – so you can write a new entry of your own or reply to an existing entry. Please go to http://ecommerce.pkeducation
.com/blog/login/ , to create your account with ‘author’ level privilege.
10:19 am
There are many efforts for industry-acedemia collaboration. As far as i know, LUMS is having already such collaboration for nurturing technoprenuers. This is definately a great stuff for Pakistan. However, not sure if people with right capabilities are teaching such courses. Mentor / Teacher should have acedemia as well as enterprenuership experience, a rare combination to find.
1:43 pm
Interesting !!
6:40 pm
Osama, thanks for the coverage.
couple of corrections:
1-Currently, this isn’t IBA sponsored, but its a personal effort to create content around course curriculum. If the effort is successful, then it can be easily spanned to other courses and institutes.
2-I’ve left my day (and night) job at PixSense and now looking for inspirations and (consulting) work
12:45 am
Farzal,
Best of luck in your initiatives. I think its a very interesting idea where students can learn from live examples like shophive.com and the companies getting important feedback to enhance their systems and services.
Best of luck!
12:38 am
I feel there is a great chance that this idea would work and help students to learn from many visionary volunteers from our industry.
The IB system of education is somewhat based on the concept of “Open-Source Education” and it’s gaining a lot of popularity.
2:16 pm
Farzal here –
the experiment was in general a failure. I distributed the links to some of the most prolific bloggers of Pakistan (mostly related to IT/Software). There was 0 feedback via blog. 1 email came with some suggestions (posted on blog). Greenwhite sent a LOT of traffic through, but no one contributed.
anyways, the blog continues as means of interaction with the students (as opposed to using an in house CMS system or yahoo groups)
3:21 pm
Farzal, you’re not thinking like an entrepreneur
If we were to give up in the first few weeks of a venture we’d still be riding horses to work.
Awareness takes a little time, and the best participants in these things start off shy – if you can find a way to make them open you this thing will be successful.
9:38 am
This type of education is being delivered 4 years ago at virtual univeristy of pakistan.
What heff you do ?