My Passion, My Vision, My Plans: I wonder if I am going to succeed?
My Passion, My Vision, My Plans
I wonder if I am going to succeed?
For a scholar or doctoral student, research is to challenge beyond the classroom environment. By research, we learn new things, pursue a new horizon, find gaps in the current research, and postulate different field approaches. In my study framework, to make it more understandable, I may have to give a little background that would provide elaborative reasons for my research.
My life was going on fine as a senior enterprise engineer at Microsoft
when I was struck with cancer. Ie ended
up in the hospital for a very long time and was let go from my position since
that senior position could not be vacant for a long time. Laying down in the hospital
bed and thinking along long nights, I told myself that I would become a doctor
and help those who were suffering like me if I survive. I survived and went to
school to do my prerequisites for medical school. I have a degree in mechanical
engineering, and studying pre-med subjects was quite challenging, but I was
determined. I scored a 3.95 CGPA and got admission to two medical schools. But,
the best planner is the Almighty, not me. Even though I was admitted to the
medical school, my dreams cut short as my daughter developed cancer and left us
three months. My ambitions got shattered and was severely depressed. Missing
her a lot, I started living in her room. As a high school student, she used to
teach mentally challenged students. I decided that I will continue her legacy
Zahra, my daughter, used to teach underprivileged and
mentally challenged students. Out of her bequest, I took that venture to
educate the third world's disadvantaged and needy students. I created not for
profit organization named Afro-American Services under my Zahra Khan Foundation.
I started helping students from Africa and other parts of the world come to the
United States for higher education.
Unfortunately, very few of the poor students can take
advantage of my services due to the higher costs of attending the USA colleges.
So, when I realized that if they could not afford to come to the U.S., I
decided to go to them. This enormous task could only be achieved by offering
education with technology with the assimilation of Artificial Intelligence.
Therefore, I am in the process of creating an accredited global online
institution. This grand endeavor required training in educational technology,
and I enrolled in the LTEC-PhD program at the University of North Texas. This
program intrigued me to get trained in the area I was to pursue for the rest of
my life.
That was the background of my late life endeavor. Since I
visited multiple countries in Africa and Asia, I realized that the students are
eager to learn. Still, either quality education is not adequately available, or
well-qualified teachers are scarce. So I started thinking about a different
model of delivering education to the masses. After long research, I recognized
the Intelligent Tutoring System's (ITS) incredible power and discovered that it
might be the beacon of light for the education hungry students.
As we all know, an ITS is a computer system that aims to
provide immediate and customized instruction or feedback to learners, usually without requiring intervention from a
human teacher. ITSs have the common goal of enabling learning in a meaningful
and effective manner by using various computing technologies. That is why I am
focusing my studies on this technology to teach the masses the same quality of
education that is the right of the rich and the privilege of the poor. I have
written articles on the subject that have been published and presented my ideas
at multiple conferences.
The topic of this research is:
The Digital Tutor and Student Engagement Techniques: An
Intelligent Way to Engage Students in ITS
The purpose of this paper is to review the successes and
failures of ITS in standalone systems and embedded in adaptive learning
environments. Elements such as student disengagement and strategies to re-engage
the learners using gaze patterns, emotion recognition, voice recognition, and
two-way dialogs using voice cloning are considered. These lessons learned are
used to predict a future Digital Tutor's design challenges.
The AACE has accepted the paper to be presented at the Innovate Learning Summit 2020 (previously known as
eLearn). My co-authors and I will be presenting the paper on November 4, 2020.
I am fueled by my desire to take hold of this great and use
it effectively to serve the most deserving. My desire to go back to learning
once again after a break for decades, a perfect 4.0 CGPA in my classes, is a
mere reflection of my aspirations. My diverse background and multiple years of
volunteering combined with my yearning to help the needy and contributions to education
can bring a new but very committed perspective to this profession.
I am confident in my
enthusiasm and ability, and I am sure that the seed that I am planting would turn
into a big tree one day, not in my lifetime, but many would benefit from it.
I am inspired by Goethe, and his words are always echoing me:
"Whatever you can do or dream that you can do, begin it. Boldness has
genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."
My journey has just begun.
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