Undergraduate reforms at DMI in Novi Sad

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Undergraduate reforms at DMI in Novi Sad

• Zoran Budimac

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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

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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?

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Contents

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

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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)

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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!

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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Contents

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

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What we did after all?
C1 Basic direction      C2 Teacher of
informatics      C3 Business Informatics
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Short description
C1 - 50 informatics, 50 mathematics
C2 - C3 methodics, didactics, e-learning
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, ...
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Essentially shorter studies - 3½

• The last year of Business informatics

Software Engineering 412   u
2 courses taken from the Faculty (biology, gastrology, hotel management, tourism, astro-physics, astronomy, ) S(645)  
Student project III 103   u
Diploma thesis   01511
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Exam

• Continual assessment
• Single-part exam at the end (just oral, written,
  or practical)

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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

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Elective courses-2

• 3 are software practice (praktikum)
• Web design
• Visual Programming
• Desktop publishing
• Multimedia
• Symbolic computation
• Office automation

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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, )

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Contents

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

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Package 5 years ? MSc
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Package 5 years ? MSc
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Computer Science
Methodics
Package 5 years ? MSc
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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

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After the new law is adopted

• Unbind courses from semesters and allow free
  choice
• Increase ECTS credits for some course to allow
  more flexibility

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Contents

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