EVENT: A Step in the thousand mile journey

Time went quickly, this is  how it goes whenever you’re having a nice conversation, and this is how it went with Dr.  Adnan El-Nasan,  Dean Assistant in Hijjawi Faculty of Engineering.

Dr. Adnan’s visit to Bayt.com is part of Hijjawi Faculty of Engineering initiative to build relations with businesses. Hijjawi Faculty of Engineering, represented by Dr Adnan, is seeking to break the ice and  to build a feedback loop and real interaction with businesses.

Dr. Adnan came with a very clear agenda. Together we went over the following:

1. Curriculum development:  We agreed that students should have better understanding of different computer engineering and science concepts. And they should have more exposure to and knowledge in:
   1. open source concepts and technologies: Fortunately, Hijjawi Faculty of Engineering has already started with this, they have been building relations with international organizations interested in supporting open source.   At the moment, Hijjawi Faculty of Engineering teaches a Linux course as part of their curriculum.  The course covers different operation system aspects down to customizing the operating system to meet your own needs!
   2. Software development methodologies: This is already part of the curriculum and is taughtas part of Software Engineering course. However, the real challenge is to convince students with the importance of methodologies to produce quality software. We agreed that business can play a vital role through seminars and presentations that reflects real life examples and applications.
   3. Web architecture, Web Development and Web concepts: we agreed that the curriculum should emphasize more on them. Again, businesses can play a vital role  to help students understand that web development is very challenging and requires much more than  HTML and JavaScript
2. Interaction events: we agreed on the importance of participating in workshops, seminars and presentations held in the university. This is highly required to help student realize the importance of the concepts introduced to them and how they are practically applied. It will also help students to broaden their horizon and to prepare themselves better to be competitive in the job-market.
3. Professional training and job opportunities for college students.

The discussion was very fruitful and reflected a sincere desire from Dr. Adnan and Hijjawi Faculty of Engineering to improve the quality of their graduates in order to have a higher positive impact on the community.

I was really very pleased to meet Dr. Adnan. His passion, energy, and focus have inspired me. And who knows, this step might be one step – if not the first – in the one thousand mile journey toward having a real software and computer industry through collaboration between universities and businesses in Jordan.