Moving Beyond Talk: A Roadmap for Quality Education

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How would you define quality education because unless you do that, all efforts to do improve will remain misguided like a jounrney without well defined destination.

Eduational quality is a difficult concept. The goal is to produce world class graduates. Universities have to be geared up to do that. It takes a wrld class university to produce a world class graduate. Creation is a reflection of the creator - graduates are created by universities.

What makes MIT better at technical education? To my mind, education is the core business business of a university. Universities and their quality is based on the quality f teachers and students they can attract and retain. All else is just frivolous detail. MIT is better because it can attract, retain and develop the best brains for teaching and learning.

A university would do well to gear its processes to this end then - all support processes. Teaching and learning are highly creative processes and cannot be standardised beyond a certain limit.

Delima that our universities face today is that they are not ddesigned to handle world class brains. These people, although belonging to one class, are highly individualised. No institution which cannt handle diversity of an intense kind and which does nt allw freedoms will be able to have these people.

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#24 by M.B.Z.Isphahani and #23 by mumbaikar : I appreciate your taking the time. At the same time, i am sorry that I totally failed to comprehend what you were trying to get across.

How would you define quality education because unless you do that, all efforts to do improve will remain misguided like a jounrney without well defined destination.

Eduational quality is a difficult concept. The goal is to produce world class graduates. Universities have to be geared up to do that. It takes a wrld class university to produce a world class graduate. Creation is a reflection of the creator - graduates are created by universities.

What makes MIT better at technical education? To my mind, education is the core business business of a university. Universities and their quality is based on the quality f teachers and students they can attract and retain. All else is just frivolous detail. MIT is better because it can attract, retain and develop the best brains for teaching and learning.

A university would do well to gear its processes to this end then - all support processes. Teaching and learning are highly creative processes and cannot be standardised beyond a certain limit.

Delima that our universities face today is that they are not ddesigned to handle world class brains. These people, although belonging to one class, are highly individualised. No institution which cannt handle diversity of an intense kind and which does nt allw freedoms will be able to have these people.

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FerozK, putting more money into education is something we need to do on priority. However, my feeling is that Pakistani university management systems and culture are not in a position to absorb investments - it takes capacity. The inefficient systems will be rewarded if money is pumped in without quality system reforms at these places.

On the same note, the ther measures you have recomended is a useful list. However, universities and institutions do not have the organizational framework which can deliver on the objectives/directions you have outlined for education in pakistan.

The measures aare also deficient because they are detached from and do not flow from a widely accepted definition of academic quality. When the purpose is not defined, what you have suggested ends up in a file as a wish list although a noble one.

What you have suggested is nice. Why do you think universities have failed to undertake these? They fail to attract, retain and develop world class faculty. The reasons are many including totally unhygenic washrooms. No matter how much money you can pay to your professors, and this is something you cannt win at....so people can make good money and pee in clean washrooms ...so why g to pakistan...

have you been to a paki university lately...?

tayyab rashid

Dear Dialogue, IMHO education (by which I mean knowledge) has no geo political or religious boundraies. One can begin that process -almost any where. Teaching dogma, applying religious labels, and painting the curricula with self serving propaganda will be unable to bring peace and prosperity. At thge same time -taking short cuts, may bring you to your deatination, at the cost of ``achieving the goal``. It is the ``journey`` -STUPID and the destination. Maybe u can guess why I call myself ``Xerox Khan``. I sympathize with his efforts, at the same time I doubt whether - force feeding grass to the Pakistani awam, was really worth it, especially today when the Jewels are out in the open, ready to be castrated.
AS long as Pakistan promotes an ideology based on religion (blind faith and beliefs), I see very little hope for educational institutions to thrive. Pakistan has already wasted 3 generations (post independence) to promote hatred and bigotry, I think this could be the begining of a long and lonely period of Darkness.

re: Tayyab Rashid

First of all, it would help if Pakistan starts investing in its human resources; teachers are paid more money and teachers are hired based on their qualifications and the research conducted by them in their fields of speciality.

Secondly; the profession of teaching is held to a code of conduct, both as far as the performance of the teacher is concerned and teacher has to perform according to a certain expectation.

Third; the course material being taught needs to be vetted and made coherent; free from political, religious or ideological or other issues and teachers instructed to teach the said material and not vent their personal believes as a subsitute for imparting instructions.

Fourth; Students need to be taught the value of understanding the course and engaging in critical thinking, which lessens the role of rote learning. The emphasis on examination as the sole criteria for measuring student performance needs to be replaced by series of subjective and objective standarized tests, phased over a proportional time of student`s progression from primary to secondary grades, which tests the overall comprehension of the student`s ability to think logically and critically.

Fifth; Instructions in post-secondary institutions need to encourage academic skeptism in students, which probes the outer limits of accepted wisdom and challenges the teacher`s perception and interpretation of a topic.

Sixth; freedom of speech should be made the sine qua non of academic discussions and the Socratic Method adopted instead of the traditional lecture methodology of instruction in post-secondary institutes.

Seven; education should be made free and public education should be made the norm in Pakistan made available nationally, but the management of such an education should be removed from the affairs of the government and handed to professional educationists.

Eight; There should be an independent verfication and accountibility conducted of the teachers by a third party organization, not affliated with the government.

Nine; The government should frame the education policy in a coherent manner; give the said education policy to the provinces for implementation and base the education budget on the projected future costs and not based on past financial cost estimates.

Ten; The education budget, nationally, should be constitutionally given a budget increase of 30 percent (not amendable) for the next 30 years and private educational institutions should be officially certified and should not be taxed but should reinvest 25 percent of their total annual revenues, as an incentive not to be taxed, in their teachers pay scales and to improve their overal educational methodologies and to provide better learning aids/facilities. This policy should apply nationally without any exceptions.

Eleven; Education should be privatized.

Twelve; Parents who send their children to schools, specially primary and secondary schools, should be given tax break of upto 40 percent of their annual taxes.

Thirteen; Students, who attend higher education/post-secondary institutions and are not able to pay for their tution, should be provided with work scholarships on the conditionality that after graduation, they would work as teachers in the rural districts of Pakistan for a period of 5 years.

Fourteen; Employment opportunities have to be created to ensure that graduating students have a job.

Fifteen; A certain percentage of the sales tax collected should be annually allocated towards funding education and paying for teachers` salaries in additional to annual federal bugdetary allocations.

Sixteen; Teachers should be made to take ``refresher`` courses periodically as a requirement for maintaing their tenured status.

Ciao

JANG#13: Thanks for posting the link to http://www.neu.edu/aap.doc . knowledge of similiar initiatives being undertaken elsewhere provides the much needed motivation to go ahead with the effort on hand.

Pakistani university however is at a very different stage of evolution from its counterparts in developed world. I do not know if you have visited one in Pakistan lately. while the problems we face are very basic in nature, they can be improved pretty quickly with little effort and the opporunity is huge. This is a classic case of plenty of low hanging fruit all over the place. If you visit a pak uni these days, you will bump into problem/opportunity after opportunity wondering why no one is paying attention. People have become complacent and they include people with PHDs as well.

One of the important purposes that benchmarking data (as suggested in the proposal above) can serve is to provide a solid credible foundation of rating universities. Once we have credible ratings in place, their is no way that university managers can continue to hide behind ambiguous loud claims since their will be comparative data ot defy their claims and counter claims. That is a basic requirement to create the environment where quality inititives will find buy in. Best practices research can help demonstrate how the better universities organize their work to achieve the levels of excellence they have achieved.

There is a severe possibility that such efforts will fall in wrond hands. last night, somebody showed me a draft proposal for setting up a body to undertake quality in Pakistan endoresed by minister of S&T research and others - costing 10.7 billion rupees. Somethign which if approved will be very harmful for the quality movement and its credibility in pakistan.

The proposal above provides a framework within which, quality can be done in higher educaiotn using the currently exisiting mechanism. Pakistan is a grave yard of buildings, ministries and departments and committess and last thing we need is more of one of these.

We know what is wrong with pakistan and pakistani universities and there is plenty. What we are asking here is not ``WHAT IS WORNG? or ``WHY DOES IT ALWAYS HAPPEN TO US?`` BUT ``HOW CAN WE IMPROVE?``. This is the a more useful question to ask.

Some of the interacts, like Jay etc have been pointing out what is wrong which has value but I guess we have had enough of that. Jay, can you read the above item and provide feedbacks. may be you can share lessons from India in this regards!! that . Let me remind you that this proposal does not aim to compare pakistani vs indian higher education but seeks to develop a mechanism within which academic quality can be achieved.
tHIS GOES FOR PARDAISI AS WELL.

tayyab rashid

What gets measured gets improved. We have to be very careful about what we measure. Leaving measures exclusively to policy makers might not be a good suggeetion as recomended by free thinker #14. It should be withinpots form educational community.

``I hope the situation has changed now. freethinker#14`` - let me say that unless we create a widely accepted structured framework within which credible calls can be made about improvements, all we will have is claims and counterclaims. Measuring university performance against carefully chosen parameters and collecting such data across a broad cross section of universities (also known as benchmarking) will give us useful comparative insights into university performance or lack of it. Unless that happens, we will continue ot have opinions and claims and counterclaims.

Dr. Atts Ur Rehman (Chairman Higher Education Commission) was quoted in ``The News`` saying there is not a single world class university in Pakistan. This is an opinion one feels like beliveing but then again, this is just an opinion and opnions have very little weight.

It is absence of benchmarking data which is hindering meaningful dialogue on improving quality of our universities. University leaders are least pushed and facts and figures used in comparative context is what is needed to provide this push. Policy makers are also not prepared to handle this task alone. Hence the above framework is recomended which can deliver wihtout creating new departments/divisions and if you read throught he above article, the proposal builds on the structures available.

#7 Jay,

It must hurt that no one wants to interact with you, fianlly frequent chowkies have learned not to listen to your barking.

Good Job Chowkies!

The subject of educational reform is very important particularly for the Muslim society because our initiation begins on the wrong foot. Our education begins at home by ``rote``. The elements of religion are bequeathed to us for believing without question. It`s also inculcated at early age that whatever your elders tell you, believe it without questioning because questioning your elders is disrespectful. ``Do you know more than they do?`` This tradition is extended into schools. Whatever the teacher says is good; accept it without question. Whatever you do not understand, cram it. The spirit of inquisitiveness is thus dulled. It should be one of the objectives of good education to spark the spirit of inquisitiveness, not to kill it.

During my tenure of education upto B.Sc., Civil Engineering, nobody taught us any elementary course on logic with the result that I with other classmates didn`t learn to think analytically. Whatever logical thinking we developed was from learning mathematics in which one is to deduce results from the given premises. Some self-motivated students learned how to evaluate if a given method of solution was fruitful; the majority however took the `sheepish` route. I remember a friend of mine at Engineering College (1953-56) who used to cram even the mathematics course work. He was not an ordinary student, he was above average. The normal method of instruction used by majority of the professors was to copy their notes on the blackboard which the students would faithfully transfer to their notebooks. The examination papers used to be set from the teachers` notes. So, the key to score high in the examination was to be able to reproduce the solutions of the examination questions. The course work, in mathematics, for example, consisted of not more than a hundred questions. So if you did not understand all of them, the temptation for cramming was always there.

The purpose of schooling in my days was to get a degree for lucrative employment; the acquisition of knowledge was only secondary. There were no seminars, period. Critical thinking which is so important for research was not part of our curriculum. There was a total disconnect between the students and the teachers.

I hope the situation has changed now. Most of the teachers have Ph.D`s these days so they must be doing a much better job of teaching. There ought to be some checks on the quality of teaching. What these checks should be, need to be determined and developed by the policy makers.