A Head of the Class

Learning on campus usually comes from the top down, with Ph.D.s instructing eager degree seekers. But what happens when the process goes sideways and students take over the classroom?

Enter the Student-Initiated Course program (STIC), founded by Ishaan Parikh ’19 and Sashank Thupukari ’20, which allows students to conceive and teach their own one- or two-credit course, with guidance from university faculty.

Parikh, a computer science major, thought of teaching his own course after participating in student-led organizations that taught him how to create Twitter bots, design drone software and other projects.

“I learned that I can learn a lot from my peers,” Parikh says. 

In his sophomore year, Parikh pitched a web intro class to the computer science department and in Spring 2017, taught the course alongside Thupukari, to 30 undergraduates. Despite being younger than some of his students, he found that teaching his peers felt natural.

“Undergraduates are by definition not Ph.D.s or professors,” Parikh says. “I’m not an expert in computer science by any standard. But I do know this cool skill well enough to teach to other people.”

This semester, students are leading 15 classes across seven departments, from “Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies” to “Introduction to Ethical Hacking,” supported by the Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

“There’s students teaching things on this campus, every day, every night,” says Dean Chang, associate vice president for innovation and entrepreneurship. “This was just a mechanism to put some of these fantastic things that are happening already in the classroom.”

Alex Brassel ’20 and Jeremy Klein ’18 designed the “Digital Logic Through Minecraft” course last summer because they wanted to beef up the university’s offerings in advanced logic design. They’re teaching the class this semester, with Klein handling creation and presentation of course slides and materials while Brassel creates assignments and does programming in the Minecraft application.

“We want (students) to have fun and hopefully walk out having learned something,” Brassel says.

In the year since STICs began at UMD, students have provided testimonials of success with companies—Parikh recalls a student at a computing conference who received a job offer from Target, largely due to what she learned in a student-taught coding interview class. As more departments incorporate student-led courses, Parikh is confident they’ll see more success stories.

“Students know how students learn,” Parikh says.