[agumonkey]

should we (could we) compress higher education ?

I found a lot of redundancy by splitting things in modules. (uml, oop, sql felt like 3 sides of the same hypercoin, granted the first 2 may disappear from books soon).

algorithmics and mathematics (and other topics) may be merged into one ?

or maybe that would be pedagogically detrimental.. I feel that it would allow more time to spend on a concept since you don't have to see bits scattered in different courses.

[tsimionescu]

I'm not sure how oop and sql would be the same thing - they are famously incompatible (object/relational impedance mismatch). UML is just a graphical notation, I would agree it doesn't make sense as a separate course.

When you say algorithmics and mathematics, do you mean all of computer science and all of maths? Do you think a single course should cover, say, Dijkstra's algorithm and partial differential equations?

Usually, each course already covers a wide array of concepts. I can't think of a single concept that was explored by different bits in different courses. The closest I can think of are 2 courses I had, one of which was focused on analytical solutions for linear algebra (matrices), and the other focused on numerical solutions to the same problems. Even then, the split did make sense, since they were focused on different concepts (mathematical objects, their properties and how to work with them in the first case, computation and more applied mathematics solutions for the second).

[gizmo686]

No student learns everything that university teaches; there is simply not enough time. It would be ideal if each student received a perfectly customized curriculum; but that is simply not practical to do. Instead, universities have a modular system; where different students can mix and match modules to cover what they are interested in. Similarly, different majors can mix and match required module to cover the material that is nessasary for said majors.

In the case of subjects with a very large number of students, it is possible to produce specialized modules, so you might have a university offer a separate probability-for-scientists and probability-for-mathematicians classes that it considers to be interchangable, but differs in how it covers the subject/what background it assumes.

[mnemonicsloth]

It turns out the brain actually likes to see concepts broken into pieces and spread out all over the place. To use your example, a better way to learn those things would have been a couple of projects where you used them all together, over and over.