1 700 Students? No sweat
Associate professor Raafat G. Saadé is not afraid to take chances. When the registrar kept asking to increase the enrollment cap for his online class, he kept agreeing.
“It’s the only way to test your methodology,” he says. “I had confidence in what we were doing.”
The course, known in its current form as Fundamentals of Information Technology and Business Productivity, started at Concordia with 28 students half-a-dozen years ago and has grown to 1 700 this semester. It is offered by the Department of Decision Sciences and Management Information Systems in the John Molson School of Business (JMSB).
In the course, the students must solve simple business problems using spreadsheet or database software and then present a packaged report. They might be assigned to build a database for a video store or a travel agency and then present their findings using Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Access.
Saadé is the first to admit that although he thinks e-learning is fantastic it’s still going through growing pains. “We’re using technology, but are we using it the way we should be?” he wonders. In some cases, administrators are quick to jump on the bandwagon, likely because of the potential to save money; others are against it on principle.
At Concordia, Saadé is seeing benefits already. He has always had an active interest in using computers to solve problems, which explains how he can manage the course, DESC 200, with the help of only one teaching assistant.
Instead of emailing queries to the professor, students type their questions into JMSB’s online question centre, which allows students, faculty and TAs the chance to answer.
“Don’t underestimate the power of the peer,” he says. “A poorly written paragraph can lead to 100 emails from students. When we analyzed the number of questions we were receiving and the type, we were able to reduce the number by 90%.”
He calls himself “a rare bird” who has had a hard time fitting into academia because of his broad research interests and industry experience in engineering, environment, e-learning and e-health. He wants to leverage technology with education to provide solutions to global problems, whether it’s handling disaster relief or improving the quality of education.
“You need to have focus to be accepted in academia,” he says. “But you can’t do research in isolation, saying, ‘I’m going to work on solving this problem and I don’t care about the rest of the world.’”
He recently completed work on two development and training initiatives in Ukraine and Pakistan and is planning to embark on work in the Caribbean as part of the Canadian International Development Agency strategy. He also has participated in e-learning projects for the United Nations and is now collaborating with the International Civil Aviation Organization on e-training initiatives.
If there’s one common theme in Saadé’s work, it’s action research: a type of problem solving in which you learn by doing. “Don’t overthink things. Do it, then adjust and adapt,” he emphasizes. “If you sit by and think things through for so long, by the time you get moving, everything has changed.”