Hustle to your 4-credit-hour class.
Scribble notes while your professor lectures.
Take your quizzes, midterms and final exam.
Do the same for your three other 4-credit hour classes that semester until you’ve completed 120 credit hours over four years to earn your bachelor’s degree.
But what if you didn’t do all that?
What if you tweaked and reconfigured and changed it up? What if you reenvisioned what higher education looked like?
It’s what a team in Grand Canyon University’s College of Engineering and Technology is doing.
“Higher education has to be completely reinvented,” said Dr. Isac Artzi, associate professor and program chair in artificial intelligence, data science and game development. “The model still being used where we lecture and students do homework, and then there’s an exam, is completely unrelated to what happens in the workplace.
“Our mission is to educate students and give them the skills so they’re ready to perform immediately after graduation. So we are reimagining the classroom to look like the workplace.”
The college is turning that traditional model of higher education on its head as it prepares to launch two pilot, 16-credit-hour, project-based mega courses in the fall, one in machine learning and the other in autonomous AI cyber defense.
Essentially, the idea – an initiative advanced by Assistant Dean of Technology Dr. Robert Loy and Artzi – is for one mega course to replace four classes in which a team of students works on an immersive project using industry specifications for 30-plus hours a week, as if they’re at a job.
They’ll do daily stand-ups, present to leadership, defend decisions and deal with priorities, timelines and budgets.
They don’t do homework or take exams. They don’t listen to lectures, with their professor at their side as more of a life coach, sounding board and mentor. And instead of a final exam, students turn in their finished project in which the final assessment is an interview-style defense.
“We are challenging the old model where concepts are taught in silos, then students are expected to connect them later,” said Loy.
Instead, “they work on a project that covers multiple skills across multiple courses,” Artzi added.
Students will receive a 30-40 page requirement document, and they’ll be told, “You have to build this. … This is what this product has to do when it’s ready.”
They’ll have to apply project-based learning theory to analyze the task, then ask themselves, “What do we know? What do we need to learn?
“OK, you are in charge of this. We’re going to learn this. … In the end, the whole team is responsible for delivering the product.”
Student workers in the Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality Lab are in the earliest stages of helping bring that vision to life.
Mason Lohnes, who graduated in the spring with his computer science degree, and Christopher Luciano, a senior computer science major, are building a self-study guide for students who will be taking the 16-credit-hour machine-learning course.
They’re also a mini focus group of sorts for Artzi: “We ask them, if you are a student in this class, what would you expect from a learning environment?”
The resource they’re building will replace the textbooks, instructor and labs – what students would normally turn to as resources in a traditional college course.
“It’s a guided, self-study environment for everything students need to learn to complete the project, because the (course) project is project-based learning,” Artzi said. “Students learn on their own.”
Lohnes clicks on his computer to pull up the learning modules he and Luciano are working on. Each module includes lessons, activities and coding challenges. The learning resource will keep track of how many lessons and exercises the students have completed and how many badges they’ve earned.
The guide will be a go-to supplemental resource that students in the machine-learning mega course will use when they feel they need that extra boost.
We are challenging the old model where concepts are taught in silos, then students are expected to connect them later.
Dr. Robert Loy
Assistant dean, College of Engineering and Technology
“The goal is that students will go to this instead of Google and AI,” Lohnes said.
He added, “I can confidently say that in most classes, I’m not using those resources,” said Lohnes. But in this case, where students are teaching themselves, “… This is helpful. If it’s something I’m learning from – something where I’m gaining insight on the topic, that’s pretty important.
“I feel like not a lot of resources do that.”
Artzi added that the vision is to eventually launch an AI assistant that will offer up all the information a student will need, and “unlike textbooks that are, at best, two years old by the time it gets to a student, this one keeps being fresh. Each time there’s a new development … it’s updated. So it’s always the most recent version of everything related to that particular project or discipline.”
What Artzi has loved about the projects going on in the AI/VR Lab is that, “We can do really cutting-edge things. We can build cutting-edge technology and tools in-house with students. That’s an untapped resource with unlimited potential, given time and resources.”
These 16-credit-hour pilot courses are leading up to something even bigger.
Students can take just one of these courses, receive their professional credentials – oftentimes certificates required to work in certain tech jobs – and start working in industry. Or, they can stack these 16-credit-hour courses – two required and three electives. Along with taking 40 hours of general education credits, they can earn their bachelor’s degree.
This initiative, “That’s a big change in the mindset,” Artzi said.
Although the concept isn’t totally new – it has been called a microdegree, certificate course or boot camp – what’s new here is replacing the traditional classroom environment.
“This is where we really want to re-imagine higher education so that the classroom looks more like the workplace. … You don’t train them (students) in something that doesn’t look anything like the work environment.”
Loy added that this idea might get pushback, but “Others will say this is what higher education should have been doing all along.
“The bigger issue is this: We keep telling students they need experience to get experience. Maybe the degree itself should solve that problem.”
Manager of Internal Communications Lana Sweeten-Shults can be reached at [email protected].
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