As for my resignation making a buzz, this is great! I loved my job as an academic (and I think the students liked me too…) but I was completely against the way people were being “educated” there.

After creating a generation that thinks, there will have more and more people who will resist or at least question the policies of the university. I believe that the students themselves can make things change.

However, I do agree I’m saying this at a speculative level.

To be more practical, your idea of making students socialize is indeed very good.
Actually, during my time at UOM, we hired an apartment at reduit, with friends. And as you say, we remember the time spent there more than what we actually did in class. And this helped a lot. Because we could have the point of view of future managers, future lawyers, future engineers, future political scientists. We discussed on subjects that we could have never imagined.

Another good idea, is that lecturers should span their lectures towards other fields. I explain. It is good to begin a class with an anecdote or an existential question that will excite the imagination of students. e.g why lawyer is considered a prestigious job in Mauritius?. Or explain object oriented technique in an abstract/philosophical perspective, and little by little make it more concrete. Or even start the class with a story. why not!.
Here again is requires quite a lot of wit from the lecturer. And the lecturer should be doing this job by passion.
To solve this problem, lecturers should undergo pedagogical training first.

And of course to make things change, we should keep on criticizing UOM. And flood them with blogs, forums, newspaper articles, radio plus, youtube. How long do you think they will continue to make a deaf ear.

The last scandal has caused the resignation of the vice chancelor. This should keep on going.
It seems that the fact that you yourself has left the university has made a buzz.

I, too, am not happy at all with what the university has become. And, as you put it, we are potentially as good as anyone else but we have an education system which is slowly creating a whole generation of terribly passive and unimaginative people. It’s high time something is done. But what?!?

Last year, I attended a session at the university called “work based learning”
This stuff has been suggested by some UK universities, and our lecturers have accepted this idea without even questioning it.

The idea is to make student follow industrial training during their holidays. And the result of the training will be used for the final grading of the students when he leaves university.

Furthermore we know that the course has changed from 4 years to 3 years and has become more specialized.

At first glance this seems a good idea. Students will come into contact with the professional world. They will learn from the professional world., and will be more easy for them to get a job.

But me personally, I don’t see it like that.
What I see is that when multinational companies have arrived to mauritius, they have successfully shacked our education system.

the UK has suggested that the course becomes 3 years, and split into 3 and oriented towards producing development skills. Not engineering skills. We did it!

Later they found out that they can even maximize their profit if they found a way to get already trained students, so that they won’t spend money on training.

So they asked university to train the students themselves, grade them, and do that during the student’s holiday. Which is work based learning. We did it (I don’t know if it has been implemented yet, what’s sure is that I have obtained a certificate that makes me eligible to give training to students)

In the end, when these multinational companies entered mauritius, we no longer can produce software engineers, students no more have holidays. And university are producing specialized and fragmented labour. Those who know Karl Marx, will know what is meant by “specialized and fragmented labour”. It is certainly not something to be proud of.

Now just think a moment what would happen when more multinational companies will access other fields of engineering like electronic, or civil engineering?

In the end, we will have a university that don’t produce people who thinks.
Little by little we will have a middle class that don’t think.
If you combine the fact that our social configuration is like a dynamite where a civil war can explode at any moment + the fact that we will no longer have a middle class that thinks, we will definitely end up with a civil war, and we will ask who provoked it.

I certainly don’t say that we should kick these companies out. But we should take great care in what the UK suggest. Because the UK don’t see us as a nation that should shine, but rather a way to make money from of us. We cannot blame them for that. It us who should resist.

For God’s sake, we mauritians we have everything required to shine. We are extremely brilliant people. We have an exceptional sense of creativity. We have been gifted a wonderful nature. The sun shines during the whole year. We enjoy one of the best democracy in the world. Everybody have equal rights.
We just need to get rid of the preconceived ideas of europe and stand on our own feet. Its high time to get out of our cocoon and reject all that our ancient colonizers want us to believe. We are a free nation and we are unique in this whole world.

Cheers!!

Students should decide how they want to live their life. either as an artist or a mere production tool.

I don’t believe that students should haste to take training from multinational companies like accenture. because these companies will forge the perception of the students towards their need. These students won’t be able to forge their own perception. hence they will lose all their creativity.
And companies like accenture do not really want engineers, but simply developers to do exactly what they want them to do.., I have worked there for 2 years, and I know what I am talking about.

I believe that university should help people develop a critical mind. Exams should be abolished and replaced by presentations. Presentations should be guided towards the latest research made by lecturers and professors.

Lecturers should share their research work with students through presentations and brainstorming session.

The IT course should return to 4 years including the industrial training.

inter departmental brainstorming session should be organized very often.

Students should be able to present any work he has done on his own, and explain his reasoning.

The whole idea is to create a medium where students are forced to create stuffs and communicate them

After the students have become mature and accumulated a great deal of knowledge and has become very critical, then he can go to accenture or any company. And accenture will have to train these students and harness their knowledge.
In this condition, the students will learn much much faster from training. secondly, he will be free to move in any field he wants. Thirdly he can provide ideas that nobody has thought about and create innovations.

The role of the university is not to train people to work. This is completely false. University is to provide educations. And education means the development of a critical mind.

Have a look at Norvig’s suggestion.

I think you have a slighted skewed image of dormitories. They are not places where orgies take place. Rather, they allow responsible and intelligent young adults to spend more time together doing productive work.

As a matter of fact, when I was at university, we mostly worked after dinner.

Concerning open source licensing issues, it’s no different from commercial licenses. When you write a software, you release it with a license and, from this moment, anyone using the software MUST comply with the license. So no need to register anything. Just distribute the source with the license.