Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Ramadan 17, 1445 H
broken clouds
weather
OMAN
23°C / 23°C
EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Talking higher education

1571529
1571529
minus
plus

It is well known that the health of the nation and its higher education system go hand in hand. And so, with the pressing need to diversify the economy, Oman has no choice but to closely monitor and constantly improve on its higher education system. High on the list of immediate concerns is how to balance a university’s resources to serve both research and undergraduate studies? Is there a way to do justice to both at the same time? What is the purpose of undergraduate education? Is it about building student character? Is it about preparing job-ready graduates? Is it about nurturing the souls and minds of young students?


At most universities, faculty performance measures, including those for promotion, pay little attention to quality of teaching and student mentoring; we don’t even know how to measure teaching excellence beyond end-of-term student evaluation surveys and occasional class observations by peers. No wonder then, why professors pay little attention to their teaching and other student-related support activities. The fact of the matter is that in many cases, faculty members may not be qualified to give any advice at all to their students beyond what is written in the programme’s study plan.


The ability to give advice varies from one faculty member to another based on the work and life experience of each faculty member, and to what extent a faculty member cares about taking the time to advise their students, when such additional services don’t count much towards the faculty’s performance appraisal.


We must admit that universities are probably the only institutions that have defied the law of evolution over the second millennium. Most universities today continue to operate very much like the universities of the past, where students in large numbers are crowded into closed halls to listen passively to their professors.


WHY WE GRADE STUDENT WORK


Ask professors about the thing they dislike (not to say, hate) most about their job, and you would almost unanimously get a reply related to grading student work. On one hand; for most professors, grading is tiring and frustrating, and it is one of those things they wish they didn’t have to do. On the other hand, most professors know very well that grading is an integral part of the student’s learning process; and when done correctly, it provides important feedback that the student can then use to better reflect on their true learning.


What is the purpose of grading? That is, why we grade student work in the first place. For one thing, everyone, including parents, seems to agree that unless professors give exams and assign grades, students won’t take their studies seriously.


And for another, conscientious professors use exams as a vehicle to provide important and sometimes personalised feedback, which helps them and their students to reflect on their teaching and learning, respectively. The problem is that there is so much subjectivity on the part of professors in the way they teach their courses and the ways they make and grade their exams. And unfortunately, this status quo seems to be acceptable by everyone including deans and vice-chancellors.


This being the case, students are left with no objective guidelines as to what to expect from a course. The natural result of this is a four-way classification of professors by students as being good and hard, good and easy, bad and hard, or bad and easy.


To make matters worse, students tend to focus their attention on their grades more so than their learning, and as a result, most students tend to favour a bad but easy professor over a good but hard one. This kind of student choice is probably one of the root causes that have led many critics, for quite some time now, to express concerns about the quality of university graduates. In the minds of many employers, though without any supporting data, the quality of university graduates in the last two decades is not a match to the quality of graduates from the second millennium.


UNIVERSITIES AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT


There have recently been a number of conferences in Oman and elsewhere discussing the role of a university in the 21st century and the changes that a university must undergo in order to meet the challenges brought along by the fourth industrial revolution.


A common belief implicit in the themes of those conferences is that universities are under attack from many constituencies and that universities have no choice but to adapt to the changes brought about by new technologies. Questions thrown at universities nowadays include “What universities do for us?”; “Can universities explain their impact on society?”; “Can universities demonstrate their direct impact on the economy?”; and “Are universities providing advice to governments to make the right decisions about issues that matter most in today’s world?”


I believe that a roadmap to answering many of these questions can be found in the sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015. Universities should view those SDGs as a blessing for they make the door wide open for universities to rethink their role in areas that haven’t traditionally been high on their agenda.


In total there are seventeen SDGs addressing global challenges. Two SDGs that are specially relevant to our topic are quality education and decent work and economic growth.


The quality education SDG has many objectives, one of which is to achieve universal access to a quality higher education. Here, universities are invited to reach out to students in all countries and from all backgrounds to provide them with an opportunity for a quality higher education.


This works better for students if universities become more inclusive rather than exclusive in their selection process.


We, university administrators, should stop bragging about the small percentage of students that get accepted into our institutions and start thinking about ways to admit the large percentage of students that were rejected. As for the decent work and economic growth SDG, one of its objectives is to promote sustained economic growth, higher levels of productivity and technological innovation.


Here, universities can and should take the lead in achieving those objectives by promoting entrepreneurship and job creation, helping students develop an entrepreneurial mindset, not a skill mindset, and helping employees of local industries maintain the right set of skills relevant to their professions.


We believe that universities will remain important for as long as they continue to make contributions to society and produce knowledge relevant to the industries, the local ones in particular. In general, universities are expected to make the world a better place by solving real-world problems through applied and fundamental research.


Finally, we invite university ranking bodies to include SDGs in their criteria. It is only fair that universities that contribute to sustainable development get the recognition they deserve.


Dr Fouad B Chedid


The writer is the Vice-Chancellor of A’Sharqiyah University. He has taught at several universities in the USA, Japan, Lebanon and Oman.


SHARE ARTICLE
arrow up
home icon