DIU Blog

Experience of Faculty Exchange in HUHST, China

It is said that “Heroes are not born, they are made”. China has always been a place of ancient mysteries and known as kingdom of Kungfu, land of dragons etc. As far as electronics and technological development are concerned, she can easily be considered as the hero (pioneer) that I mentioned earlier and to support my statement, I would say, she did not born as a hero, rather she was made by her people with their endless endeavor and capacity of hard working. Now she has become a role model to the world. Recently, I had a chance to visit this country as an exchange faculty member and teach programming and robotics for a month. Since then my notion about China has ever grown stronger. Let me introduce myself, I have been working as a teacher in the Department of Software Engineering under the Faculty of Science and Information Technology at Daffodil International University. My current position is Assistant Professor and Associate Head of the mentioned department. Daffodil is truly an international university in terms of her number of overseas students and in terms of MOUs and MOAs with several hundred universities and academic institutions around the globe. Under such agreement with the Hunan University of Humanities Science and Technology (HUHST) located at Loudi in the Province of Hunan, China, I was invited by the university to teach there for a month (Feb 27 to Mar 22, 2019) as an exchange faculty. This is how I went to China and thus I came to learn about Chinese people, their education, customs and culture. China respects her teachers and loves foreign people, specially the people of Bangladesh. I was assigned to teach computer programming for the 1^st grade students and Network programming in the 3^rd grade students from different bachelor programs under the School of Information.

It was assumed that language might be a problem; however, I found communication was not. I found them very polite and gentle. The most important quality they posses is punctuality. They never miss a schedule and always on time to a task particularly assigned to them. I have seen students coming to attend the classes on time and I found all the theories and lab classes that I took, of 99 % attendance on average. Teachers take good care of their pupils. I have learned from them how teachers and administration manage everything by using application software. As they are very used to WeChat, an application in their smartphone, they have integrated all other necessary software as well as their education and learning system with it. I have seen teachers are taking quizzes and class tests by using students’ smartphones, saving tons of papers and keeping the environment clean. Thus they were able to take benefits from their habit to use technology. Their Class rooms are equipped with digital technologies as well as big chalk-boards with students seating on their desks, which are arranged in a gallery fashion.

In one of my weekends, I found time to visit Shenzhen, know as their technology hub and their silicon valley. Shenzhen is one of the prosperous cities in China. I was amazed by her capacity and innovation and I was thrilled to visit many such places there. During my visit to Shenzhen I was able to roam around the campuses of three world known, world famous and world ranked university’s graduate schools. Toward the end of the China visit, I was given an opportunity to conduct a cultural session to represent the customs and culture of Bangladesh. In front of a full house auditorium, I proudly presented Bangladesh and invited the participants to visit our nation. The very last activity with the students of that university was the workshop of embedded programming for robotics that I took. Besides teaching them basics of robotics, I came to know how much they are advancing in this field of study. However, I have seen a group of mature students programming the same robots that we have bought from the same vendor for the students of Daffodil International University, which made me realize that we are not much behind. Eventually, as a part of this exchange, some students with the professor Bingqing Jiang, who was also the key person of my visit and the Director of International Affairs of HUHST, will be visiting Daffodil International University later on this year 2019. Hope we will also be able to keep our pride and show them what value do Bangladesh and her people posses.

Kaushik Sarker
Assistant Professor and Associate Head
Department of Software Engineering, FSIT
Daffodil International University, Bangladesh