Dear Vanderbilt alums,
You may remember our course on Introduction to Database — CS 265 (https://my.vanderbilt.edu/cs265/). I’ve been teaching the course for 20 years, and there are over 500 “alums” of the course under my instruction. This year I am contacting as many alums as I can find (even beyond CS 265), and inviting you to reconnect with Vanderbilt in a new way. I’m also highlighting this possibility for Vanderbilt staff, other students, and friends — a database course for One Vanderbilt.
This year CS 265 students are working through Jennifer Widom’s Self-Paced Online Stanford Course in Database (https://class.stanford.edu/courses/DB/2014/SelfPaced/about) as a part of their CS 265 requirement. This course is open to anyone, is completely free, completely self-paced, is no pressure, and if you wanted to freshen up on database, it would be a good place to do it. It is also high quality material. You could learn database for the first time if you weren’t in CS 265.
In addition to or instead of signing up for the self-paced course, I’ve created LinkedIn and Facebook groups, and a Google+ community, each called “Introduction to Database Learning Community” — you can join by request. I hope that these are places for our students and alums, instructors, students, and other learners and mentors to talk about and network on database and computing. Here is a snippet of what I tell students about these communities on the CS 265 course site (https://my.vanderbilt.edu/cs265/learning-communities/).
“I’ve heard it said that Vanderbilt students don’t adequately take advantage of Vanderbilt alums as part of their early professional social networks, so we will see if creating a community of alums and students helps change any of that. In addition, when you leave Vanderbilt, we want you to have lifelong learning opportunities with Vanderbilt. This is part of the motivation too — inviting alums back to learn with us, perhaps to freshen up their skills, even as they mentor us with years of experience following CS 265, in industry or otherwise.”
Creating and maintaining lifelong learning opportunities for our students and softening the boundary between student and alum is an important motivation too.
In any case, whether you join or not, I hope that you’ll look me up — either when you are in Nashville (I’ll show you Warren College), or virtually, if you don’t make it back often.
Best,
Doug
Douglas H. Fisher
Faculty Director of Warren College
Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Computer Engineering
Vanderbilt University