Teaching Statement
Teaching Statement
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My experience in the classroom goes back to my college years when I was a volunteer extra-curricular teacher in the suburbs of Tehran. It was during my Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign that I designed and thought my first full-fledged class, (2005-2011). Over the years I have come to appreciate the value of active learning more and more. If I'm asked to do a 15-minute lecture, I fit in at least one activity therein. My classes are highly interactive and I view teaching as a coaching exercise: students in my classes try and practice concepts, techniques, and tools with I as a guiding coach by their side, and I help them improve their work processes and products. I focus on a set of key ideas in the course, avoid over planning, and value depth over breadth.
Here I share a little background about each class and sample exercises.
Systems Analysis & Design
Applied Data Mining
Advanced Systems Analysis & Design
Directed Information Technology Project
In the ITPM course, we cover topics from both PMBOK and PMI ACP. For many semesters my students and I have been conducting the learning process as an Agile project, working in learning sprints, monitoring WIP, having Learning Masters to guide the group learning process, and using Kanban boards to track learning progress.
This is a graduate level course in the Master of Information Systems (MSIS) that covers high-level management and policy topics in the area of the information systems. Sample assignments and work by students are shared here.
The graduate-level SAD focuses on analysis and design but focuses on independent learning work required by graduate students. In the graduate courses students analyze, design, and implement an end-to-end cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) application.
Directed Information Technology Project
Directed Information Technology Project
In this class, we match students with project owners (usually small business owners in the area) and students take it from there. The teams are expected to experience a project work close to real-life projects: with ambiguity, communication dynamics complications, and human dimensions. Therefore it's not a technical work that makes the project difficult, it is all the dimensions of a project like managing stakeholders and keeping scope under control. I take no credit for students, successes but here's a success story I'm proud to share.
Systems Analysis & Design
Systems Analysis & Design
At the School of IT in Illinois State University, we call the course Systems Development I. The course focuses on Analysis and Design. Over the years, the course has taken many forms.
During some semesters I used prototyping Mendix and/or programming in Android Studio as tools to improve practice of analysis and design concepts. During some other semesters, I used only modeling tools such as GenMyModel or Visio.
Applied Data Mining
Applied Data Mining
In Applied Data Mining, all major data mining models are covered, with an introduction the theory and inner workings and a focus on application: linear and logistic regressions, decision trees, neural networks, clustering, association rule mining, Bayesian & gradient boosting models, and support vector machines.
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