A past graduation ceremony. FILE PHOTO | NMG
Former US President Barack
Obama once said: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person
or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the
change that we seek.”
Our failure to change university
curricula as the Fourth Industrial (4IR) Revolution beckons is
tantamount to burying our heads in the sand.
At the 5th
Partnership for Skills in Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology
(PASET) forum two weeks ago in Kigali,Rwanda, it became clear that our
university programmes need change if we want to be competitive in the
era of 4IR.
PASET was set up five years ago as a
platform “to discuss approaches, strategies and potential models to
adapt education and training ecosystems to respond to the opportunities,
challenges and risks of the 4IR and digital economy.”
Africa’s
approach to education necessary for 4IR is wanting. Yet the nature of
work is changing. Unlike in the past when a first degree could guarantee
you 30 years of working in the same profession, a student graduating
today will change jobs more than 15 times in the same period.
Dr. Elias Towe, a professor of Engineering at Carnegie Melon
University, said at the forum that students today need flexible programs
that can enable them to change in an increasingly dynamic technological
work place.
Prof Towe noted for example, that while
African engineering programs take 10 semesters to complete, it takes
eight semesters in the US and most of Asia to complete similar degrees.
There
are too many unnecessary additions to African engineering programs that
do not add value. Other parts of the world have defined outcomes
derived from the needs of the country. The university then sets goals
along national aspirations. These are then cascaded to the department
level where specific objectives define the curriculum.
More
often than not where such objectives are set, the students finish their
programs with a project that specifically deals with a real-world
problem and offers flexibility to code, collaborate and interact with
the real world as well as undertaking multidisciplinary courses from the
humanities as a strategy to build the student’s soft skills.
These
important additions are absent in African universities making what they
want to achieve fuzzy. Presenting at the same forum, Chao Chen, general
manager, State Grid Corporation of China, Ethiopia Branch, said in
addition to completion of the academic degree, graduating students go to
an equivalent of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET)
to sharpen their practical skills on the job before they are deployed
or promoted.
As a result, the corporation becomes
efficient to the extent that cost benefit is passed on to the consumer.
Kenya Power and Lighting used to have such facilities for training
engineers. At some point this was abandoned. Today, blackouts are the
order of the day. Our pedagogical methods also came under scrutiny.
Whilst most presenters emphasized teaching students to learn how to
learn, African universities focus on assessment largely based on final
exams.
Sometimes the curriculum is so wrong that no one
can guarantee that the exams can assure the fitness of purpose of the
learning outcomes we seek to achieve in many of our programs.
This
indictment comes on the heels of Education Cabinet Secretary George
Magoha urging universities to consider courses that they are offering to
avoid duplication. He was asking the vice-chancellors to encourage some
creativity in selection of their programmes bearing in mind that there
are national aspirations that must be addressed.
Universities
must be at the forefront in linking Vision 2030 or the Sustainable
Development Goals to the programmes that they offer.
In
my view, universities should begin with the problem in mind before
designing new programmes instead of copying and pasting. For example, we
should seek to solve the problem of water then design an engineering
programme to deal with water problems now and in the days to come. Why
do we give priority to mechanical engineering when we have no water?
Food for thought if we need to deal with our future problems including
4IR.
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