Summary: Degrees and diplomas give opportunities for comprehensive knowledge gathering. Online courses are short and have limited scope. For degrees or diplomas, we need to keep the entire course in front of us and decide how to incorporate the latest from each module into the syllabus; this requires input from industry and experienced startup experts. Examples hold for subjects such as software engineering; it’s time we reduce lectures on the theory of the waterfall model and instead teach them how to automate scrum processes with ready AI, hands-on practicals using real software engineering data. That is the need of the hour. And this would fetch them jobs.
It’s time to reduce the gap between academia and industry. What does Dario Amodei of Anthropic have to say about it? Do the AI companies care about the future of young generations who are entering universities now? In just a few days’ time, their sessions will start. What course descriptions are you giving them? Ask AI companies; they won’t tell you.
It’s not just universities; there is a deficit in online course materials too. The majority of online courses still teach coding as if they are teaching it to a schoolchild. We need more AI intricacies in courses now, be it diplomas, certifications, or online degrees.
Details in topics can be covered in a master’s specialization. For now, teach job-ready content to students. What is the point of teaching subjects like technology from 50-year-old books when all students need are industry-ready skills?
Teach them how to run AI on their subject matter. Teach them how to sit on top of an AI code generator. Teach them how to handle AI doing fresher-level white-collar jobs.
We need more AI-skilled graduates. Whatever your subject is, AI has touched your specialization. Why not teach that to students, so that they can take over industry jobs?
Why not call in the industry to help you? Call in start-ups for a tie-up with universities as the faculty is currently giving assignments to code in Python in labs. It’s time we taught students how to automate code, run LLMs, and train and test.
Even online course providers need to update their courses. And they know they can earn a lot with these kinds of online courses as academia has a deficit for such topics.
How to bridge the deficit in technical, state-of-the-art AI training for students? One way is to invite startups; another is industry-academia partnerships; yet another is to rely solely on university incubators. In this model, faculty teach the concepts, and implementations are taught directly by academia incubator contributors.
It’s time we produce AI-specialized graduates, not graduates who have only completed coding assignments, but graduates who have completed assignments focused on running automations. Whether it’s robotics, AI, or ECE, we need to teach the latest automations.
An online course can help those who have already graduated or those who want to start early. However, online courses are not comprehensive. Degrees and diplomas offer opportunities for comprehensive knowledge acquisition. Online courses are short and have limited scope.
For degrees or diplomas, we need to keep the entire course in front of us and then decide how to incorporate the latest from each module into the syllabus; this requires input from industry and startup experts, as well as practical know-how. For example, data structure assignments can be framed to help students understand the theory through practical labs using existing libraries, making them aware of Python packages that do so, along with process visualization. The same holds for other subjects, such as software engineering; it’s time we reduced lectures on the waterfall model and instead teach students how to automate scrum processes with ready, hands-on practicals in AI using real software engineering data.
This requires a complete overhaul and restructuring of the course syllabus, aims, and objectives of almost all subjects in atleast the computer science department. But this is the need of today.
Artificial Intelligence and Future 