An Inside Look at How NYU Tandon is Revolutionizing the Digital Frontier
It doesn’t take an expert to see how much radical change our educational system has undergone since the beginning of the pandemic. In the ever-evolving landscape of education, the paradigm of learning has been turned upside down.
However, it does take an expert to tell us what this change really means, and how it might shape the near future of higher education.
I recently spoke with Shivani Dhir, an Assistant Dean of Digital Learning at NYU Tandon, an institution renowned for its innovative approach to technology-based education. Her insights shed light on the profound significance of digital learning in today’s educational panorama. Dhir’s expertise and Tandon’s innovation in steering technology-based education and lifelong learning initiatives are truly inspiring.
You can read our conversation below. I walked away from our conversation with a whole lot of optimism for the future of our educational landscape, and I expect you will too.
Damian Bazadona: For the digital learning skeptics out there, how do you ensure that online programs maintain high standards of academic integrity and authenticity?
Shivani Dhir: We recognize online students have expectations of a high-quality student experience and a high level of academic rigor, driven by the strong legacy of the institution’s on-campus programs. Our goal is to maintain the same standards of education, regardless of the modality — on-campus, online, or hybrid. We do this intentionally in a few different ways:
First, there’s faculty and academic department oversight. At NYU Tandon, all degree programs reside under an academic department. That means that irrespective of the modality, the faculty leadership and oversight of graduate programs are consistent.
Then, we offer innovation support. We don’t just teach about technology, we provide guidance on how to leverage it to build better learning environments for our students. Often, our faculty use educational technology and innovations to both teach online and augment their in-person classrooms.
Lastly, we prioritize the student’s individual experience. Our online student community is predominantly composed of working professionals since the online modality offers them the flexibility to balance work and life with academics. Recognizing that the motivations and career development goals of these mid-career professionals may vary from our traditional on-campus, predominantly early-career student body, our online student services team designs and delivers programming customized for this audience.
Damian Bazadona: I’m not an educator, but I can speak to working in a hybrid environment — and I agree, finding a way to support a variety of different needs is key.
I’m very interested in hearing a bit more about Tandon’s Bridge Program. For those reading who might not be familiar, can you tell me a bit about how the Bridge Program operates? How does it support students without technical undergraduate degrees transitioning to engineering graduate programs?
Shivani Dhir: There are huge talent gaps in emerging tech-driven fields like cybersecurity, AI, data science, wireless networking, robotics, and more. We simply do not have enough people with the right skills to fill these jobs. At the same time, there are so many ambitious, talented people working right now who have the capability to excel in these jobs — many of them high-paying, offering great career and economic stability — but who either didn’t have access to STEM education earlier on or who didn’t recognize the potential in these fields when they were in school.
Bridge offers a second chance to learn those STEM concepts later in life. It’s an intensive and rigorous, but flexible, online program designed to give participants the foundational technical pre-requisite skills to pursue and succeed in a graduate-level STEM program.
Once the participants successfully complete the program, they not only have the option to apply to graduate programs at NYU Tandon but also at other universities that we have partnered with and accept the Bridge credential. Some of the partner institutions include programs at several CUNY schools, Pace, GWU, and more.
Damian Bazadona: It’s clear that Tandon cares a lot about looking after its students beyond the time they spend in the program. Looking ahead, how do you envision the role of digital learning evolving in the future, and what kind of innovation is on the horizon for Tandon?
Shivani Dhir: A globally-renowned academic and student experience and flexibility in engineering education is not a zero-sum game. A successful engineering and technology workforce unquestionably hinges on bringing more interdisciplinary, industry- and market-responsive programs to a more diverse talent pool through the flexibility of online instruction, while maintaining the uncompromising level of academic excellence and hands-on student support that our in-person community has come to expect.
NYU Tandon Digital Learning brings the NYU Tandon student-first mindset, global perspective, and commitment to academic rigor to interdisciplinary programs that are responsive to industry and market needs and purpose-built for online delivery.
I think you can expect to see more interdisciplinary programs like the Masters in Emerging Technologies program that we recently launched; more collaboration with companies to customize programming specific to their employees; and I think you can expect to see us bringing some of the learning from these online programs into the in-person classrooms.
Damian Bazadona: I completely agree. And the more accessible the resources, the more an industry can diversify the people who contribute to it.
What’s an example of a successful online learning initiative or program you’ve developed or enhanced? How did it impact student outcomes?
Shivani Dhir: We recently launched an innovative, interdisciplinary engineering MS program this Fall that gives students the flexibility to tailor their degree to their unique professional interests and aspirations. The fully online MS program is distinct from other master’s programs as it offers an unprecedented level of flexibility for an advanced engineering degree.
Within months of announcing the program, we received hundreds of inquiries and applications for the program and we were excited to welcome our inaugural class with diverse backgrounds and career goals into the program a few months ago.
Another example is our Cyber Fellows program, an online master’s in cybersecurity with a 75% tuition discount. This is an interdisciplinary degree in the field of Cybersecurity, and was created to address the talent gap in industry. We’ve continued to see a lot of interest in this program, and we’ve seen our graduates have great success — alumni of the program have landed new opportunities and leadership roles across a range of industries including traditional big-tech firms, large financial institutions, within government and the military, as well as at infrastructure and utility companies.
Damian Bazadona: Speaking of that interdisciplinary degree, I know Tandon stresses the importance of an interdisciplinary education, even within a specialized field like engineering. How do you encourage students to explore interdisciplinary interests while at Tandon?
Shivani Dhir: At Tandon, we’re reimagining engineering education, with interdisciplinary and experiential learning as two important aspects of the student experience necessary to equip graduates with the skills they need to excel. We’ve just launched an in-person undergraduate minor in quantum technologies, which will draw on faculty expertise across applied physics, mathematics, and computer science, among other areas.
Our interdisciplinary approach isn’t exclusive to education; it’s really at the core of Tandon’s strategic plan to harness engineering and technology to solve societal problems in vital areas — Communications/IT, Cybersecurity, Data Science/AI/Robotics, Emerging Media, Urban, Sustainability, and Health — all of which require perspectives from multiple fields.
Damian Bazadona: It’s abundantly clear that innovation is in the lifeblood of Tandon–is there an example of a time when a student took advantage of the unique opportunities of digital learning in a meaningful or interesting way?
Shivani Dhir: When most people think of an engineering education, they probably envision the period from the undergraduate years to doctoral studies and maybe, in some cases, post-doctoral work. But that’s a very narrow window when you consider a person’s professional journey as a whole. As society and industries around us continue to rapidly evolve to effectively respond to real-world challenges such as climate change, and food insecurity, an individual’s professional trajectory is becoming less and less linear. There is no such thing as a terminal degree in STEM anymore.
When I think about our impact, I think about the students with non-STEM undergraduate backgrounds, like Philosophy or English or History, who completed the Bridge program and then Cyber Fellows, and are now successfully leading security and cyber risk teams at large financial institutions; I think of the students that graduate from the Cyber Fellows program and have returned to take advantage of our CIO and CISO executive programs so they can be successful in their new leadership roles; I think of students who completed an undergraduate degree at Tandon a few years ago in mechanical engineering and have returned to Tandon to pursue the interdisciplinary MS in Emerging Technologies.
Our students are the architects of their own success, but nothing makes us happier than seeing them leverage skills and opportunities at Tandon that then contribute to achieving their professional goals.
Damian Bazadona: What unique opportunities (online or in-person) does NYU Tandon offer its students to connect with industry professionals and gain real-world experience in engineering?
Shivani Dhir: We’ve had student teams working with industry partners such as Daimler on process improvement for their trucking operations and with faculty to develop an adaptive mountain bike for wheelchair users. At CSAW, the world’s most comprehensive student-run cybersecurity event that was founded and is hosted at Tandon, we hosted talks from people at Google, HP Labs, and Trail of Bits. We hosted the National Offshore Wind R & D Consortium symposium in December through our Urban Future Lab cleantech incubator, and students had access to those sessions to hear about the future of that particular sector of renewable energy from key industry professionals.
In addition to that, specifically for our Digital Learning students, applied learning is critical for success at work. As we design programs for working professionals, at the core of our approach is the idea that they should be able to find ways to apply what they learned in the classroom back at work the next day. The benefit of being in a program with peers who are also working professionals is that you learn just as much from each other’s professional experiences as you do from the expertise of faculty. Whether it’s our online degree programs or our executive and professional programs, this is one consistent piece of feedback we receive from students. They value the experiences of their peers and the network that becomes available to them through their classmates.
Damian Bazadona: Lastly, what advice would you give to prospective students who are passionate about engineering but may come from non-traditional backgrounds?
Shivani Dhir: We need more engineers. In the same way the world needed more machinists, more mechanics, and more coal miners for the industrial revolution, the world needs more people who understand technology and engineering now, and the door is open for anyone willing to learn. We are always looking for ways to fling it open wider for anyone willing to walk through it. More than that, we need people from different perspectives in engineering to make sure that the technologies we are building offer equal opportunities to everyone, so new innovations aren’t just benefiting the few.
For example, we have people working on identifying and reducing potential bias in AI, we have people working to bring cheaper, cleaner transportation to underserved communities, and we have people working to make it easier for the visually impaired to navigate cities. And the people leading those charges are people who bring their life experiences to their work. For example, one of our faculty members, JR Rizzo, is visually impaired, and he’s partnering with wireless and robotics faculty and our Tandon students to bring key innovations for the blind to NYC.
Nothing should hold you back, you are needed. Check out Bridge-type programs, investigate scholarships, and see if your employer offers any kind of tuition assistance. And, of course, look into applying to NYU Tandon if any programs meet your needs.
