Teaching Philosophy:

Dr. Alok Srivastava

This is more about "facilitation of learning," even though I am calling this my teaching philosophy. I have outlined the general nature of my approach to create opportunities for you to acquire and develop skills that will prove to be valuable in your life. In an era of continuous improvement, interdisciplinary integration, and short lifecycle of skills, my motivation is to help you build confidence and prepare you for the era of "Just-In-Time" training. The world is rapidly adopting the "open-systems" model for knowledge creation, dissemination, and use - which is making it necessary for me to try the approaches described below. Please provide me your input as I try to make a transition into developing a more meaningful environment for your learning.

Collaborative Learning:

I strongly advocate team-oriented learning in my class. Research is indicating that for this kind of a course the best strategy is to create a structure of topics, provide several opportunities to bring related topics into perspective, and create an environment that facilitates implementation of concepts into meaningful applications. The motivation is to accomplish synergy through sharing of information and skills.

"Learning by Doing" Model for Pedagogy:

This model (constuctivism) calls for facilitation of learning versus the traditional approach of instructor-imparted teaching (objectivism). I will provide you with several opportunities to apply concepts and techniques to "real-world like" cases. This kind of integration/synthesis of knowledge from diverse sources is necessary to be able to create meaningful IT solutions/applications. An important part of this approach is "reverse engineering" to learn systems development. I will provide examples of solutions to cases and we will reverse engineer these solutions to gain a better understanding of the modeling process.

Student-Centered Learning:

This approach encourages you to develop your own context for learning. Meaning and relevancy of concepts can be highly enhanced if you think of an application scenario in your profession and be able to use ideas covered in the course to enhance existing methods. Those seeking to acquire marketable skills use opportunities in class to develop/refine skills that are needed in today's environment. Your projects should reflect applications that demonstrate improvement over conventional methods and cover technology skills that are considered current.

Covering all aspects of Knowledge Acquisition:

I will try to create opportunities for you to acquire all aspects of knowledge associated with the content of this course. These aspects are : Know-what, Know-how, Know-why, and Care-why. Know-what is associated with the understanding of concepts and techniques. Know-how is the understanding related to the application of concepts/techniques. Know-why is an understanding of the relevance and appropriateness of the application to real-world situations. Care-why is something you need to think about (this aspect of knowledge acquisition is more about you than the content of any course).