Tag: STEM education

Empowering Students Inside and Outside the Classroom

By Shankar Sastry

How do we educate students to become lifelong learners? University professors are continually grappling with this question, as we aim to spark students’ curiosity and engage them in thought-provoking coursework.

This fall, I am re-engaging in teaching undergraduates after 11 years, leading a 200-person course on robotics and intelligent machines. Although I will need to extensively supplement the textbook I wrote more than 20 years ago for the course, I am excited to connect with students in my field and take part in a changing undergraduate pedagogy at the nexus of technology, design, and problem solving.

Shankar Sastry is Faculty Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies and NEC Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley.

Students today learn differently than my generation and have new tools at their disposal. In my class, all lectures will be recorded and made available online. This allows students to engage with the material in new ways. If they miss a lecture, they can catch up afterward. If they have questions or find a topic challenging, they can consume the lecture at their own pace, pausing to make sense of information or look up answers to questions as they arise. Indeed, it is common for students to have class-viewing sessions in their dorms. And if students are familiar with a topic area, they can watch at 1.5 speed or just focus where they need deeper understanding.

This approach is a boon for faculty as well. It frees us up to answer more substantive questions and workshop homework or challenges rather than respond to the students’ request “to explain that theorem one more time.” Giving students the ability to learn at their own pace and in their own style is one way to make learning more self-directed. It also transforming the role of faculty from holders of knowledge to knowledge guides and exploration counsellors.

Another way we are trying to inspire lifelong learners is by engaging curiosity. For the second time, we are offering a Development Engineering graduate section of our core undergraduate Global Poverty & Practice class. By opening up a graduate section designed for engineers, we aim to encourage engineering graduate students to pursue knowledge they might otherwise not encounter. The class will connect critical debates around development and foreign aid with current issues around technology (such as data privacy) and research (AI and job churn).

Finally, if we are to educate lifelong learners, we must acknowledge we are aiming not only to expand students’ intellect but also their life choices. Attending Berkeley is a widely viewed as a catalyst to becoming an engaged citizen—but only if students have the time to reflect on their individual motivations and career trajectories. Too often at Berkeley, we don’t create enough space for students to have conversations about their individual growth and journeys. To that end, we are developing a toolkit that will help faculty better facilitate conversations around personal motivations, leadership skills, and offer student workshops that will help them design (and re-design!) lives that are purposeful and fulfilling.


A New Era in Global Development Training

Shankar Sastry

Higher education is having a disruption moment. Not so much in the sense that universities will no longer be physical places where professors instruct students—as has been the case since 859 when Fatima al-Fihri founded the University of Al-Qarawiyyan, which became the world’s first higher education institution to award degrees in mathematics, grammar, and medicine. No, higher education is in a period of intense transformation due to the increasing pace of new advances in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)—and the way the fields mutually reinforce each other to transform and advance society.

Why are we at a STEM moment? To put it simply, these four fields have done more to generate economic growth, advance scientific innovation, and create jobs than many others. Mind you, I do not think STEM inventions have been free of negative consequences. However, many of the beneficial technological advances of the decade plus—mobile phones, GPS, the Cloud, CRISPR, generative adversarial networks, machine learning, AI-based predictive analytics, electric vehicles, chatbots, and mass production of solar arrays—have originated in STEM fields.

Yet with each passing year it becomes obvious that the STEM fields need far tighter integration with the social sciences, arts, and humanities, especially for graduates focused on local and global challenges and seeking to advance socioeconomic mobility, jobs and sustainable manufacturing, and access to clean water and affordable health care. As Kofi Annan so eloquently said, “Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy, and sustainable human development.”

With this in mind, we at the Blum Center have been looking at the changing profession of global development. In speaking with former students and current employers, we have noted a distinct rise in the need for societal benefit professionals with advanced technology skills. But the story is more complex than that. Development professionals—whether at UN departments, municipal government agencies, multinational companies, foundations, or nonprofits—report the need for a combination of skills, such as the design and management of technology, knowledge of emerging technologies, evidence-based assessment techniques, economic development, social problem solving, and cross-cultural collaboration and community engagement. 

The recent report “Next Generation Professional” published by USAID and Devex, for example, states: “Development professionals a decade from now will not look the same. One reason is technology. It’s easy to envision a time when drones streamline every agricultural development program, when every health worker is equipped with high-tech mobile diagnostics, and when artificial intelligence provides real-time data to guide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. The shifting development finance outlook is another factor. Program managers, resource mobilizers, and partnership professionals might continue to seek grants from bilateral aid agencies, but they may also partner with private sector corporations, attract impact investment funds, or manage crowdfunding campaigns targeting specific causes. Tying all these together are the softer skills—like communicating across cultures and working in teams—that make the industry truly unique.”

I mention all this because the Blum Center has begun thinking about how to build upon its courses for the Global Poverty & Practice minor and the Development Engineering designated emphasis, to provide these in-demand professional skills in a time effective manner. We have seen many STEM students and professionals who are looking for careers with impact, but have few avenues to get the right tools for framing and solving societal scale problems. And we have seen many non-STEM students and professionals who need the technical skills the future development sector demands. These constituencies want us to offer a professional education with a focus on problem solving skills for complex societal problems at the nexus of new technologies, new business models, and changing communities and their needs.

What do you think of this? What are we missing? Come talk to us about this new era of global development training.

Shankar Sastry is Faculty Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies and NEC Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley.