October 7, 2005

Visit to ASU East

Prepared by Mudassar Imran

 

We traveled to ASU's Polytechnic campus. It is about 20 miles form ASU main campus. We met in  front of the student union at 2:00 p.m. We went to a union meeting room. All the PFF members were gathered there. The program starts at 2:30 p.m. First of all a brief introduction to the programs at  Polytechnic campus was given to us.

 

They have four major colleges:

1)   Education

2)   Business

3)   Health sciences

4)   humanity and Social Sciences.

 

From this fall they started a new engineering program. They told us that this campus is much better than 10 years ago. They are planning to hire 25 new faculty members this year. At start they had only 900 hundred students but now they have 5000 students. They also have eight residence buildings. After this brief introduction about the campus, the PFF members introduced themselves to each other. This introduction session ended at 3:00 p.m.

 

After this session we were taken to a biology lab/classroom. The classrooms we saw had tables and high chairs. They use white board for teaching.  This is well designed for biology classes so that instructors can use the whiteboard and computers simultaneously.  The room  has a wireless computer connection for every student.

 

After this, we went to the Engineering building.  Vicki Sealey already talked with engineering people about our visit. They arranged a PowerPoint presentation for us. We were given a handout with the course list and four year curriculum including planned for primary and secondary concentration. They told us that they have thirty students and seven teachers right now. This is the first year of their program. Typical load for a teacher is three courses. After this there was a question and answer session. The visit ended at 4:00 p.m.