Teaching, learning, assessment and research in our universities and other tertiary institutions must ensure graduates’ employability and marketability.
Universities should therefore direct their efforts towards the needs of working life, combining vocational training and theoretical and practical knowledge with special emphasis on new forms and methods of teaching, practical training and cooperation with industry and other sectors of the economy.
For example, students taking education should have ‘residency periods’ covering their four years of studying in primary and secondary schools in their locality that count towards their teaching practice evaluation. Work life skills in teaching are not acquired in four weeks of teaching practice! This also applies to students in the other faculties. Learning should respond to labour needs and include the development of general skills, and workshop floor experience widely valued in employment.
Universities are at the centre of the educational-workplace continuum, and should, therefore revaluate their curriculum , pedagogical approaches, modes of assessment, ambience and aesthetics of their learning environment and adequacy of their infrastructure. More people have been joining universities in the past five years and this is welcome.
However, this has serious quality implications, considering that there have been no commensurate additions in staff numbers and physical facilities, while the criteria for admitting students, particularly for post-graduate programmes now allows candidates that cannot meet the intellectual demands of their courses to register. This has long term negative impacts on our socio-economic well being as a nation.
Despite impressive academic achievements by our graduates, many fail to be attractive to prospective employers due to their lack of generic thinking skills or soft skills (unless of course they join the public service where accountability in terms of performance and deliverables is an ‘outlier’ function!).
Unesco’s study on graduate unemployment reveals that employers today value linguistic and literacy skills, including soft skills such as communication ability, numeracy, thinking, learning and basic computer literacy. Unfortunately, our universities produce graduates who are generally deficient in all or most of these skills as they are not part of the curriculum. Universities must ensure students benefit from both content knowledge and generic skills.
These skills include communication, critical thinking and problem-solving, team work, information management, statistics and data analysis, entrepreneurial, and leadership.
Many of the graduates use social networks such as facebook, twitter and e-mail, but not for the conceptualization, mastery and search for knowledge. Learning skills are also important as knowledge of facts and theories in books and journals have a short shelf-life.
Knowledge gained in universities is purely latent, discipline specific and applicable only to a particular — and usually quite insignificant — segment of the job market. What, for example, is the value of our post graduate programmes’ evaluation criteria of 70 per cent exams (rote learning and regurgitation) and 30 per cent (for continuous assessment)? What does a Masters or PhD student need to ‘prick’ his or her intellect?
Employers are no longer using qualifications to select individuals for fixed and routine roles and pedagogies must be process-oriented, as is the case in universities in Canada, the US, Australia, Finland and the UK, where a specific skills profile is embedded in the curricula or conducted as a separate compulsory skills development program.
Pedagogical methods employed in universities must include generic skills as part of content delivery.There should be greater participation by students for knowledge construction and acquisition of generic skills above.
Finally, there is nothing more central to the learning experience than assessment. Students spend less than 10 per cent of their time on non-assessed academic work. Studies in schools have shown that students who score well on tests often are unable to successfully use memorized facts and formulae in real-life application outside the classroom.
It is time to change the current ‘jug and mug’ model of learning in universities that views the lecturer as dispenser, the students as passive receptacles.
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