Category: 2.1 Teaching (General)

To my disconcerted students:

Sadly, the massive layoffs in Silicon Valley and around the world that we are currently observing are a low-frequency yet business-as-usual event. Let me tease apart the different components and draw some conclusions for your career.

First of all, you may have observed how they are all happening at once. This is no coincidence: Layoffs are bad press and so companies will try to make it go over as smoothly as possible. Once one company got going, others will hurry up and take the opportunity to jump in.

Continue reading “What to Make of the High-Tech Layoffs”

With the recent general availability of chat AIs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, teachers have to ask themselves how to deal with student homework potentially created using these tools. In the following ten minute video I provide a short illustration from my own teaching how students might use such chat AIs in creating homework, and I discuss how a teacher might react to it.

Continue reading “An Illustration of How Chat AIs Might Disrupt Teaching”

In this fifth semester of the COVID-19 pandemic, I can’t help but predict that teaching by way of lectures will be getting more bipolar. I foresee two main modes of lecturing:

1. Increased use of videos in online lecturing rather than live performances
2. Traditional in-person lecturing without serious online presence

This may hardly sound surprising, but some of the underlying mechanics that are leading me to this prediction may. There are two noteworthy developments:

Continue reading “Lecturing is getting increasingly bipolar”

These are the three top pieces of career advice I give to my students:

1. Feel comfortable with people and culture
2. Be close to revenues, not expenses
3. Join a growing organization

Continue reading “Top Three Career Advice for Students”

I bring in guest speakers from industry into my courses, a lot. The benefits of doing so are are mostly that (1) industry speakers can cover some topics better than me and (2) the change of pace in teaching keeps students interested. In general, I don’t save time, though, because engaging industry in my teaching requires extra work.

Continue reading “How I Work With Industry Guest Speakers”

I previously discussed why “soft” research (qualitative research) is so much harder than “hard” research (quantitative research). The main reason is that there is less and later feedback, which can be incredibly frustrating for the impatient researcher. A similar argument applies to teaching “soft” skills, which is much harder than teaching “hard” skills.

Continue reading “Why Soft is Hard v2 (in Teaching)”

“Teaching young minds is great and keeps you young!”

There is some truth to this made-up quote. Growing older, you might get set in your ways, but younger people will most certainly challenge you to rethink those. While there is a lot of positive things to say, I want to discuss two difficult but critical issues that a new college teacher needs to be aware of, in particular if they are coming in from industry.

Continue reading “The Downside of College Teaching”