Knowledge Update

Digital gadgets have become a necessity in digital era of modern life style.

Creative writing deviates from the conventions of academic or technical literature and is a fictional and creative type of writing.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) have been a key component of high-performance computing for the past ten years, and they continue to make strides in emerging industries like cryptocurrency mining, the Internet of Things, autonomous driving, and massively parallel computing.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mathematics was the driving force behind virtually all technical and scientific advancements.

Sustainability is a way of living that tries to create a balance between the economic, social, and environmental performance of an organization. 

No doubt that the world is undergoing many fundamental changes in all aspects of economic, political, social, and technological life.

There is a strong belief that even with the logical decisions we make, there are a lot of emotions feeding that logic. Professionals try to assure that people can put aside their feelings while they are making a particular decision, but in reality, that is almost impossible.

Women`s writing or in a border sense literary works written and produced by women is one of the central issues in women`s and gender studies.

Corona pandemic has been highly disruptive for almost everyone and has caused severe drawbacks to most of businesses and education systems worldwide, but it was also a blessing for other sectors. In this article, some light will be shed on both sides of the argument.

Corona virus has affected a lot of businesses around the globe. They either bankrupted and shut down, terminated a good number of their employees or cut down their wages as a way to survive the financial struggle they were put in because of this situation. Sectors such as restaurants, real estates, ports, tourism, oil companies and air flight companies have been struggling to survive since January 2020 until this moment. As an example, according to Bloomberg, about 200 companies in America shut down this year and they blamed Coronavirus for that. More than 25 million Americans lost their jobs. In Kuwait, among other countries, about 350 thousand expats will be leaving Kuwait by the end of this year as the Kuwait government declared because of the companies’ financial trouble. This is only a small idea about the damage the COVID-19 pandemic has caused to countries.

Education is another story. As the governments have locked down the countries, it was not possible for teachers and students to join schools anymore. The number of students went down, especially in private schools, as a result of having their parents lost their jobs. So, there was no income to spend on schooling. Also, a lot of teachers became jobless. Another problem raised about education is the methods that should be developed for safe teaching and learning, without affecting the education system. To make sure that students stay on track, many programs were used to accomplish this task. One of the most famous and successful programs are Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Both programs allow video and audio conversation with students, share information and even save the sessions for students to revise later. However, some of these programs drawbacks are internet connection and a smart phone or a laptop availability. If any of this combination is not there, the circle will not be complete and no teaching produced; hence, no learning process. Some families are poor and can’t afford to buy a computer or have internet. Some countries don’t even have these services. Because of this, ministries of education need to come up with new ideas to overcome this problematic situation. The crisis can be seen as “a wake-up call” for countries and showed the desperate need to further research and fund to equip schools with the right infrastructure and technology that help education to stay on. Also, it has shown the challenge to provide teachers and students with the skills needed to adopt digital learning in education. As result, the concept ‘work from home, learn from home’ is the nest option for now.

Out of the ash has risen technology sector, which is considered the only one that gained a fortune in this pandemic. To explain more, telecommunication companies, social media and video communication companies that use video and audio calls such as Teams Program and Zoom Program, online market companies that sell products such as Amazon.com and noon.com, are now the shining stars among all companies in the world. Other educational programs have been adopted, such as Microsoft 360, latest version of PowerPoint, Articulate 360 and Bandi-cam program, among others.  For example, the owner of Amazon company is now the richest person on earth, with a total wealth of 1 trillion $ as his company shares have increased rapidly recently.

No one knows when this nightmare is going to end, but for sure life before corona will never be the same after corona. People will have to change their lifestyle habits for many years to come. People will tend to depend more on online purchase, online classes and meetings. Education will depend more on technology than before. The new life will definitely produce more ideas to make sure less contact among people. A newly born life style will arise and new generations will take the lead to the bright future.

How to cite this article:

Habboosh Muhammad, Business and Education: Life Style after Corona, <https://www.skylineuniversity.ac.ae/knowledge-update/from-different-corners/business-and-education-life-style-after-corona>

I am writing to you today as an educator and as a life-long learner.  My topic is:  does outcomes-based education or OBE do more harm than good? I will begin by defining outcomes-based education, then outlining major international examples of its failure - after which I will discuss key reasons for that failure and leave you with a possible solution.

First of all, what is OBE?  In practice, it means teaching and assessing students based on specific outcome statements instead of a set syllabus.  What is deemed to be important for a course is set out in a series of statements which begin something like this: The student will: demonstrate, apply, use, perform, etc.  The students are then taught according to those statements and evaluated as to their progress against those statements and nothing else.

An interesting question with OBE is, does OBE assessment reflect and support learning or hamper student success?  In OBE assessment, marks are weighted per stated outcome, firmly limiting the range of marks attainable per response by a student.  This can have negative consequences in the real world.  For example, if Albert Einstein had taken an OBE math test whose outcomes included adherence to set norms, he might well have scored badly or even failed the test.  OBE limits an educator’s ability to award marks according to their expert knowledge of student and subject, instead of forcing mark allocation according to pre-determined norms with no allowance for divergent thinking or alternative responses.

The next question is, where has OBE failed?  The answer is, everywhere,  as educators, we have known for years that outcomes-based education isn’t producing good results; major experiments in OBE in the US with the so-called common core programs, saw the USA go from 7th in maths to 31st in international tests according to the USA today; in South Africa OBE was introduced as the National Qualifications Framework and rapidly saw South Africa tumble in world educational ranking to the bottom, number 148 out of 148 in maths and science according to the world economic forum rankings.

Why has it failed?  To understand why OBE is failing so badly, my thoughts go back to the purpose of education as put by renowned educator John Dewey at the start of the 20^th century.  He asked a simple question:  When we talk about teaching, are we talking about teaching rote facts and pre-ordained responses or are we talking about the ability to be creative thinkers and innovators.  Dewey’s question sets up a dichotomy between rote learning and creativity. Each of these two things has its own place in the learning environment, but only one is served well by OBE.

OBE calls for the educator to teach every student the same thing in exactly the same way every time, this is rote learning, it is not student-centred; it is instead focused on the need for standardization of output.  A prime example of this practice can be seen in the system of standardized testing now used for graduation in most school systems.  Fact-based material such as grammar, business models, procedures, and simple mathematical equations are examples of how OBE serves the first of Dewey’s purposes of education well, but not the second, and in my opinion the more important, particularly for higher education.

Perhaps you see my bias creeping in here, I have witnessed how outcome-based education locks educators into only teaching to prescribed, specific goals. The problem with this is that there are only so many hours in a course and those outcomes must be mastered within that time.  With time used up achieving  “measurable” outcomes, less measurable, but higher- order learning - like creativity, thinking skills, divergent thinking, even social, practical, and artistic learning take second place, or are not learned at all. 

Worse, and perhaps the key problem, is that outcomes are often treated as a one-shoe-fits-all solution by administrators who are trying to satisfy institutional licensure and program review requirements which have little to do with actual learning.  Being driven by such requirements is a huge disadvantage if you want a well-rounded and complete education.  The purpose of education should be to make students into well-informed thinkers who are aware of past knowledge, but able to creatively innovate and contribute in their future.

Teachers are experts in their field and experts in their knowledge of their own student’s learning capabilities.  OBE systems, set up by and suited to administrative top-down “quality” requirements, do not serve the learning needs of individual students or complement the expert knowledge of classroom educators.  Instead, they are intended to create academic rigor through some weird sort of pseudo-scientific knowledge outcome bean-counting exercise. In reality, outcomes induce a sort of intellectual stagnation - exactly because they are not learner-centred, or even educator-centred, and this must change.

The solution may be self-evident, it is to use outcomes where they have value, but not apply them where they inhibit or restrict learning.  In other words, to move away from the all or nothing thinking behind the implementation of outcomes so that they become a tool used to teach and assess where appropriate.  However, this solution will require a monumental shift away from the top-down managerial approach to learning which is pervasive today; a democratization of education if you will, where educators take back responsibility to educate from the managers who have usurped it.  This will make outcomes a tool of learning - not just a means of regimenting institutional activity.

Let’s stop blindly insisting on outcomes as a universal panacea for measuring the success of education and make learning learner-centred again.  Remember, this is not academic, it affects each one of us, students, educators and society alike - right here, right now.   As students and educators, we must speak out and start the debate around relegating OBE to the parts of education where it suits best and promote better adapted assessment structures in other areas of learning.