Undergraduate reforms at DMI in Novi Sad Zoran Budimac.

Undergraduate reforms at DMI in Novi Sad

Zoran Budimac

Reasons Reforms started in 2002, due to many compromises, left

‘unfinished’ The new University law Create more attractive studies and to ‘collect’ more students Make better differentiation between our directions

Business informatics (reform it completely) Teaching informatics (reform it completely as business informatics –

some courses + methodics, didactics, e-learning,… ‘Basic’ direction (extend it from 4 to 5 years and then cut the fifth

year. All directions were reformed. Here: just informatics, i.e.,

business informatics

Constraints Our colleagues-mathematicians still think that

informatics is the subfield of mathematics Almost no one likes elective courses

“What will happen with me if no one elects my course?”

Contents Procedure What we did after all What after A short glimpse

Procedure to reform curricula ‘Conceptual’ meetings (council, all) (45 days) Technical meetings (council) (12 days) Course contents (5 days) Information dissemination (site, TV show) (5

days)

‘Conceptual’ meetings Goal: discussion on the course lists, concepts, … Organization: 1 double meeting every week (council then

all), lasting for 3 hours Formal presentation After meeting: working groups, circular mails, answering

questions, phone calls, lobbying (lobbing), counter presentations, … Where is my course? What shall I teach? More mathematics! Less elective courses!

And then go back (five times) The original idea did not change at all!

When it was finished? After my last presentation containing just

three questions. Shall we continue to have studies of informatics

or not? Would you like more students of informatics in

the future or not? Will you try to reform studies such that above two

goals are fulfilled or not?

‘Technical’ meetings Goal: reviewing once more the number of contact

hours, ECTS credits, to check is every course at the right place (esp. if it is the common one for more directions), adjusting the ‘look and feel’ of all directions, linguistical issues, …)

Producing material in 3 different versions! Organization: 1 meeting every day lasting for 3

hours Working with a lot of papers

‘Course contents’ meetings Goal: to put the right contents into every

course Organization: in working groups, just 1

meeting lasting for 1 hour Possible and wanted contents were already

discussed during ‘conceptual’ meetings Nevertheless, hard ‘physical’ and organizational

activity

Dissemination and advertising Goal: to let people know what we did Presentation on TV Organization: 5 meetings every day,

preparations, trying demo software, bringing camera-mans, creating the whole scenario with questions of the presenter to us

Contents Procedure

What we did after all What after A short glimpse

What we did after all?

C1: ‘Basic’ direction     C2: Teacher of informatics     C3: Business Informatics

Short description

C1: - 50% informatics, 50% mathematics

C3: - 75% informatics, 25% rest, mathematics specially created- 42% elective courses- “Ethical issues…”, “E-Commerce”, “Multimedia”, “Visual Programming

“Desktop publishing”, “Finances”, “Management of software projects”, “Computer networks”, “Web design”, “Compiler construction”,

“Object-oriented programming”, “Data Structures and Algorithms”, ...

C2: - C3 + methodics, didactics, e-learning

Essentially shorter studies - 3½ The last year of ‘Business informatics’

Software Engineering 4+1+2   u

2 courses taken from the Faculty (biology, gastrology, hotel management, tourism, astro-physics, astronomy, …) Σ(6+4+5)   *

Student project III 1+0+3   u

Diploma thesis   0+15+11

Exam Continual assessment + Single-part exam at the end (just oral, written,

or practical)

Elective courses-1 42%

2 are courses from the whole Faculty 3 are student projects (new topics are announced

every semester, guests from industry) Mobile agents Case based reasoning .net E-Learning Advanced techniques of AI…

Elective courses-2 3 are software practice (“praktikum”)

Web design Visual Programming Desktop publishing Multimedia Symbolic computation Office automation…

Elective courses-3 Others

1 from mathematics (Decision theory, Analysis II, Information and coding theory, Applied analysis, Modeling and simulation)

3 from Informatics (SPM, Databases II, Comp. Graphics, IS II, …)

Contents Procedure What we did after all

What after A short glimpse

“Package”: 5 years → MSc

“Package”: 5 years → MSc

Computer Science

Methodics

“Package”: 5 years → MSc

Why this scheme? 3.5 + 1.5

3 + 2 3 may be too short for engineering-like professions Many are now switching to 3.5 + 1.5 scheme

4 + 1 1 may be too short for MSc studies If MSc thesis is worth 30 ECTS credits, then there is just

1 semester of lectures

After the new law is adopted Unbind courses from semesters and allow free

choice Increase ECTS credits for some course to

allow more flexibility

Contents Procedure What we did after all What after

A short glimpse