"My class is not very popular," admits Associate Professor Mohamed-Slim
Alouini in a forthright assessment of his course on statistical methods in
electrical and computer engineering.
From the perspective of many electrical engineering undergraduates, the required course on probability and random processes is "too mathematical." At this phase of their education, they haven't yet witnessed the engineering applications of the principles they're learning in Alouini's class.
"But if they want an accredited degree, they have to take this class," he says, and therein lies the challenge for teacher and students.
Despite his insistence that he's not an exceptional teacher, Alouini's careful preparation, consistently high student evaluations, and multiple teaching awards suggest otherwise. And his style proves that exceptional teaching isn't synonymous with razzle-dazzle classroom pyrotechnics.
Armed with nothing more than a 15-foot whiteboard and colored markers, Alouini rivets the attention of these undergraduates three times a week during an 8 a.m. lecture. At an hour when many of his colleagues are still groping for their first cup of coffee, he's blanketed the whiteboard with mathematical symbols and meticulous notes.
Alouini says that organization is the key to his success as a teacher. Before each lecture he arrives 15 minutes early and fills the right half of the whiteboard with notes grouped neatly into three categories. First he posts administrative announcements, then a point-by-point summary of the main points covered in the previous class, and finally a list of the coming lecture's important concepts.
"That way, even the students who arrive late see the outline," explains Alouini, who gives credit for the idea to one of his professors at California Institute of Technology, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1998.
However, in a broader sense he's been absorbing pedagogical techniques since childhood. He comes from a family of teachers, including his mother, a retired professor of English in his native Tunisia. Fluent in Arabic, French, and English, Alouini speculates that teaching may just come naturally to him as a result of growing up in his family and of having been a student himself.
"Faculty life is a natural continuation of student life," he says. "Instead of taking exams, now you give exams."
His teaching philosophy dictates a persistent attention to basic concepts and a willingness to intervene when a student's performance begins to lag.
"I try to make sure that everyone in the class gets the basic principles," he says. "That comes from giving many examples in class, sometimes at the cost of not covering more advanced material."
He keeps a running tally of student performance based on quizzes and homework assignments. He orders the teaching assistant in his undergraduate classes to calculate "up-to-now" grades for each student, and before the semester drop-add deadline Alouini personally contacts every student earning less than a C.
"I ask all [of them] to come to talk to me," he says. "I ask them, 'What can we do? Am I going too fast? Should you drop the class?'"
Counseling a student to drop a class isn't always easy, but Alouini would rather deliver a little bad news mid-semester than be forced to award a failing grade at its end.
"I care about what happens to my students," he says simply.
