Helping students prepare for a wireless world
By MATTHEW DEMBICKI, Published April 27, 2007

Michael Qaissaunee lives and breathes wireless technology and its use in education.

Qaissaunee, an associate professor of engineering  technology at Brookdale Community College (BCC) in New Jersey, is such an advocate and innovator of using technology that his passion helped garner him this year’s educator of the year award from the Global Wireless Education Consortium, an honor he shared with a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor. The award recognizes college and university educators and their role in preparing wireless technology leaders.

When Qaissaunee proposed creating a wireless communication program at BBC a few years ago, no other two-year college in the country had such a stand-alone program. At the time, wireless programs were either built into electrical engineering programs or offered at four-year institutions, usually at the graduate level, Qaissaunee said.

BCC brought the program to a two-year level while keeping the courses academically rigorous, especially in math, and more importantly put it in context for students. Students in the program learn to become wireless technicians. The courses cover the gamut, from understanding what a wireless signal is and how it works to developing a wireless security network.

Interest in such programs is increasing as the wireless industry grows and looks for qualified skilled workers. While the current tech-savvy generation is interested in this technology, often curious about how various components—such as cell phone Internet access—work, older students also are realizing the job potential in the field, and they are returning to college to get the training or to update their skills.

“About 60 percent of the people we get are incumbent workers who come back to get those wireless skills,” Qaissaunee says. “They are finding there is a greater and greater demand in their organizations to have some understanding of wireless in addition to the skills that they already have.”

Incomes in the field range from starting wages of $15 an hour to annual salaries of $90,000 for a wireless security certified professional.

Despite students’ eagerness to break into the business, their enthusiasm is sometimes curbed when they learn they don’t have the necessary math skills needed, Qaissaunee says.

“The biggest weakness that students come in with is being underprepared in math,” he says.

That’s part of the reason why Qaissaunee integrates contextual learning of math into the curricula he has developed for the courses. Qaissaunee adds that he’s worried that as similar programs around the country develop, the contextualized-learning component may be dropped to expedite the courses.

“You need the mathematic rigor in the program. You don’t need a Ph.D. in electrical engineering to understand it, but with some simple examples and hands-on work to help students visualize what’s going on mathematically, you can get students to understand this material,” he says.

Qaissaunee also advocates using new technology—blogs to wikis—to teach students. But there’s a challenge there: Qaissaunee thinks many of the online courses are often just an electronic version of old textbooks. He is currently testing a wiki-book that would have chapters written by experts in the field who would keep the material up to date.

“Doing it this way, it’s a book that never goes out of date because you always have these people maintaining it and have the opportunity to add dynamic content such as audio and video,” Qaissaunee says.

Qaissaunee recently submitted a proposal with Hofstra University (New York), the University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) and State University of New York—Buffalo to develop a “massive multi-learner online learning environment,” or MMOLE. The new system would allow large numbers of students to simultaneously interact with each other, much like online multi-player video games, Qaissaunee says. In fact, that’s what it’s modeled after, and it will target middle school students to teach them technology programs in a team setting.

Qaissaunee promotes the use of new technologies in teaching and learning throughout the college campus as well as nationally. He is the founding director of the Mid-Atlantic Institute for Telecommunications Technologies, which was established with National Science Foundation funding to develop cutting-edge technician education programs in wireless communications.

Qaissaunee is also one of the lead principals for the National Center for Telecommunications Technologies (NCTT), where he serves as the expert in wireless communications. Qaissaunee and NCTT Executive Director Gordon Snyder Jr., operate a podcast on technology and teaching at www.nctt.org/podcast.