PARADIGM SHIFT IN HIGHER EDUCATION

 

B. Gültekin Çetiner¹, Nedim Türkmen¹ and Oğuz Borat²

¹Dr, King Abdulaziz University Jeddah, ²Dr, Marmara University Istanbul

gultekin@drcetiner.org, nedimturkmen@hotmail.com, oguzborat@gmail.com 

 

 

Abstract

 

Recently, higher education goes through a paradigm shift. The instructor based education changes into the learner based education in this new paradigm. The former and the new paradigms as well as the Virtual Education dimension of this new paradigm are discussed in this article. 

 

 

1. Introduction

Paradigm is a name given to all of the written and unwritten established rules and practices in any field. In other words, paradigm is the name of a perspective, comprehension and understanding. A paradigm may cover the long lasting experiences and proven processes. This does not mean that the mentioned paradigm will always become successful. When the new paradigm destroys all the stereotypes and establishes its own rules so as to invalidate the old paradigm, the old paradigm will no more have any grounds to succeed.

 

The classical example of paradigm shift and paralysis is the Swiss firm. As you may know, although this firm used to be the only leader in the world watch industry and introduced the digital watches to the world, it has lost its market share to the Japanese watch firms within only 1-2 years because it failed to comprehend the new paradigm which included the watches without the ticking sound and because it caught paradigm paralysis in its classical terms.

 

Another example to the paradigm paralysis is the IBM firm. IBM had created the first PC for the end-users using the cheap and standard off-shelf products. However, as this firm was stuck to its old paradigm in the field of hardware and software, some of the firms – e.g. Dell in the PC hardware sales and Microsoft in the software (operating system) axis – have suppressed this PC developer firm with the new paradigm they developed.

 

 

2. Paradigms in Education

Today, paradigm shift is observed in the field of education as in many other fields. It is useful at this point to consider the old and the new paradigms in higher education. The education and training programmes to be followed in the classical paradigm are prepared as lectures (courses) provided in one term and the curriculum of these courses. The labour market which will employ the students is not consulted while preparing or revising the programmes and the demands and expectations of the industry and service sector are not taken into consideration.

 

Various courses (term lectures) in each programme, their contents and credits are defined in an academic hierarchy. Moreover, in some of the universities, the courses may be subjected to the academicians’ intensive demands of change, which aim to maintain their own course potentials rather than considering the relevant sector’s concerns. Although there are some elective courses in a programme having such structure, in general a rigid programme is provided to the students. Also the goals and levels of students are ignored. Always certain problems arise in including the demands of the labour market, which is the client, into the programmes and designing the courses accordingly.

 

Another problem of the classical paradigm is that it considers the students as having the same background and forces the students to synchronously enter the courses which are scattered into the weeks in one term. The students who can rapidly progress in the course and the slow or inadequate students due to their former infrastructure, progress rate or goals are subjected to the same courses.

 

Synchronized education is one of the most common rules of the classical paradigm. As the optimum duration of learning is different among the students, synchronized education creates a problem in terms of learning efficiency.

 

The learning efficiency is not related to how much time the instructor spends for which course and how much credit, but it is related to how much learning takes place in the total duration (by showing that the defined knowledge and skills are acquired). It is necessary to shorten the time a student spends for learning a certain skill or knowledge in order to increase the learning efficiency.

 

It is clear that the efficiency will increase if the students can take the courses which will help them realize their goals or which they are willing to take synchronously. In the classical paradigm, the students can graduate by taking any course which is appropriate to their schedule and which will probably be opened, because they cannot graduate without completing a certain amount of credit. How well may the learning efficiency be in case it is maintained through such a choice? 

 

One of the most defended issues in the classical paradigm is the justification that interactivity with the students should be high in the instructor-based classes. The point, which needs to be considered here, is the rate and quality of this interaction and the learning, which should take place as a result of this interaction. It is an important problem that the multimedia equipment necessary for increasing the quality of interaction cannot be used in all the classes because of its cost. The main factors in communicating knowledge are:

• the communicator,
• the receiver,
• the platform on which the knowledge is communicated or the infrastructure (media), and
• the message itself.

 

As the student who is the receiver here should be focused on the subject or should be at a level appropriate for perceiving the message, the learning efficiency which may be reached as a result of the interaction in education will decline. Such complaints are frequently made by the instructors in the traditional education and training: “There are many subjects to cover and it is impossible to complete them by the end of the term”. The problem here is that the subjects to be covered may be outdated until the student graduates or will become old and obsolete because of the new technologies.

 

We now live in the informatics era in which the knowledge is updated rapidly and no university library can reach the speed of accession to knowledge. It seems more meaningful to describe certain goals for the students for each course and help them acquire this knowledge in the way they prefer, instead of adding more subjects to the course content. And this brings us to the concept of outcome-based education. Although outcome-based education is a concept, which can be used at the course designing stage in the traditional education and training, it complies better with the new learner-based paradigm.

 

The paradigm has now started to turn into a learner-based paradigm instead of the instructor-based education. The most important characteristic of the traditional paradigm is that it requires huge investment costs and it necessitates the receivers (students) to be present in certain places at certain times.

 

 

3. Informatics Revolution and the New Paradigm

It can be said that the old paradigm is a form of education, which appeared following the transition to industrial society from the agricultural society. In this model, in which the production sector is prevalent, production means creating a physical product by using the inputs (raw material) and certain transformation resources (labour and machinery) in certain processes. The resulting product involves an economic added value. Mainly high investment and operation costs are required in order to create the product. However, in the informatics era, for instance an intelligent newly graduated programmer may turn an idea into software, which will be purchased by everyone in the world with the help of a keyboard. The resulting product is not a physical entity. The reproduction of this product is as much as the cost of a CD or disk. However, the resulting value is much more than the value resulting from the other type of production. In developed countries, we can see that the service sector is highly developed and the industrial production has shifted towards developing or underdeveloped countries.

 

Thanks to the informatics revolution, information is rapidly:

• produced,
• made widespread and 
• updated.

 

Now neither the university libraries nor the course contents and programmes can challenge the new paradigm using the existing paradigm. The power against the old paradigm is nothing more than the informatics revolution itself. Now many approaches in the existing higher education need to be questioned and changed.

 

As it was mentioned in the introduction section, it seems difficult to seek help from the existing paradigm in order to escape from the paradigm paralysis; because it is difficult for the people in the paradigm to escape from their habits which were shaped as a result of the long lasting experiences in a period when the paradigms are the strongest.

 

The time of emergence of the new paradigms generally roots back to the strongest time of the old paradigm. For example, the Swiss firm used to have almost 80% of the world market in the year when the Japanese firms started to sell the new digital watch.

 

As it is difficult for the paradigm shift to emerge from the ones who rule the old paradigm, in general external paradigm pioneers are needed. Although the paradigm pioneers have many important characteristics, mostly the following groups are considered as candidates [1]:

a)     The newly graduated young people who come from a different and new educational process

b)     Old and experienced people who are open to change (lifelong learners) and who change their fields of expertise or shift to the new fields

c)      Independent souls. These are the people who are in the old paradigm, but can think independently. They are named as Maverick. Maverick is the name of the person who won a big cattle herd in poker, but set this herd free instead of using it commercially as expected.

d)     The people who poke their nose into anything, who love to repair or try to jimmy the objects, and who try to acquire knowledge in every subject (tinkerer).

 

By looking at the above groups, it is possible to say that a single-type education approach cannot create individuals who may produce new paradigms. The paradigm pioneers are the ones who establish the rules of a new game.

 

The new paradigm, which is called the learner-based education, seems to create a paradigm shift in the traditional education system along with virtual education, distant education or blended learning. The instructors who are stuck to the traditional paradigm make hasty decisions on these methods like “I do not believe in distant or online education”, but these methods are being applied by many institutions in various forms.

 

 

4. A New Paradigm

The place and time of learning is not a limiting factor anymore. Now people can reach what they look for rapidly through Internet and its tools. Many big universities and educational institutions transfer many of their programmes to people all over the world through distant education. Here a number of characteristics of a new paradigm which include a distant education system benefiting from the informatics revolution are described. These characteristics can be realized as a pilot project with the support of the suitable software.

 

The most important characteristic of the new paradigm is that the student takes the whole responsibility. The students may choose courses from the desired programme within the entire system in line with their goals and the course objectives stated in the programmes. The course objectives should be defined in the course design within the programme.

 

In this learner-based system, the subject topics are determined so as to realize certain objectives/outcomes during the design of each programme/ course. The programme objectives and outcomes are determined specifically or in accordance with the criteria of certain organizations, which control the quality, such as ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) [2] or the needs defined by the organization itself. Then the subject topics are turned into a matrix so as to correspond to the outcomes of the programme objective as seen in the below example (Figure1).

 

 

Programme: Industrial Engineering

Course Name: Engineering Management

Accreditation Programme: ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology)

 

	Criteria or Outcomes (Outcome Elements)
Subjects (Topics)	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h	i	j	k
Describe fundamental scientific and engineering principles in engineering organizations as relevant to management	1	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
(Apply scientific principles to the decision making problems in management)	3	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
Classify software tools available for solving management problems	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	2
Select appropriate techniques and tools for a specific management task in an engineering organisation	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	4

 

Figure 1. Classification of a number of topics in the Engineering Management course according to the ABET a-k outcome elements

 

 

5.   a-k ABET Criteria

 

Examples

 

Outcome a: An ability to apply knowledge of mathematics, science, and engineering

 

Outcome k: An ability to use the techniques, skills, and modern engineering tools necessary for engineering practice

 

In the above matrix, the cells at the intersection points of the topics in the lines and the criteria in the columns are rated from 1 to 6. The points correspond to the taxonomic levels defined by Bloom [3]. Number 1 corresponds to the lowest level of learning that is knowledge and number 6 corresponds to the highest level of learning that is evaluation. The levels and their meanings according to the Bloom Taxonomy are described below.

 

1. Knowledge: Recalling the previously learned knowledge. This is the lowest level of learning. It is based on memorization. Some of the verbs to be used while asking questions to the students in order to understand if they have acquired the level of knowledge are:

Arrange, Define, Repeat, Select.

2. Comprehension: Grasping the meaning of knowledge. Comprehending the knowledge and telling in their own words.

Sample verbs: Classify, Defend, Discuss, Explain, Express, Extend, Give Examples, Summarize.

3. Application: Applying the knowledge in real life

Sample verbs in the questions: Apply, Demonstrate, Modify, Solve, Use

4. Analysis: Dividing the objects of ideas into simpler components and seeing how the components are connected with each other and how they work

Verbs: Analyze, Categorize, Discriminate, Model, Question, Test

5. Synthesis: Making up a new integral idea out of different ideas and components

Verbs: Reconstruct, Plan, Design, Compose, Rearrange, Develop

6. Evaluation: Making judgments and evaluations based on the evidences, indicators or external criteria

Verbs: Choose, Compare, Conclude, Explain, Justify, Evaluate

 

The matrices are prepared in a similar way for each course. If the average point of topics in a course is more than 3, then it means that this course can at least take the student to the level of Application. If the average is 1, then it means that this course can take the student to a maximum level of Knowledge. The student should be able to go up to the higher levels in the Bloom taxonomy when the averages of all the courses are obtained in the same manner. It is important to measure the student outcomes after the courses are designed in this way. To this end, the measurement and evaluation tests are needed which will be performed according to the values in the course matrix. All the tests such as the quizzes, assignments and projects should be prepared according to the outcomes stated in the matrix in order to understand how well the student meets the expected outcomes of the matrix. A number of sample questions are given in the table below which may be used to test the outcomes defined in the matrix. Software should be developed and used while preparing the examinations in order to provide help on what type of questions to ask.

 

Table 1. Sample questions in order to measure the course outcomes (Engineering Management Course) and certain criteria (ABET in this example) at a number of levels (Bloom Level)

 

 

Sample Questions to measure the outcome of Engineering Management Course Objective Matrix	Measured ABET Criteria	Measured Bloom Level
Define as a list the scientific methods which may be used by the managers in an engineering institution	a	1 (Knowledge)
Solve the decision making problem given below using the decision tree method	a	3 (Application)
Which software can the engineers use in an enterprise when they are about to make a risky decision?	k	2 (Comprehension)
Which software tools would you choose in the decision-making problem defined below in detail?	k	4 Analysis

 

 

At the design stage of the courses, the exam questions may be prepared automatically by drawing from a question database at the determined dates after the topics to produce outcomes at various levels are determined according to certain criteria (e.g. ABET) and it is defined through which measurement (quiz, test, examination, assignment, etc.) the student will be tested.

 

This course designing system may be operated in integration with a distant education system. Then the outcomes are automatically evaluated using such tools as online quizzes and assignments and an electronic portfolio may be formed for each student. Thus, it may be questioned how the student has graduated after meeting which criteria at which level as a result of the courses.

 

All the possibilities and activities provided by distant education may be used in an outcome based educational system. These are:

 

1. Resources such as presentations, multimedia files and links to the other pages related to the course. All the students may reach these at anytime and anywhere.
2. Assignments. The assignment and projects submitted online or offline.
3. Chat rooms. The live discussion media where the instructors, students and learners can attend for various topics. The media where interactivity can be used intensely. It is superior to the traditional classroom medium in the sense that everyone has a chance to select any room according to their goals and levels.
4. Forums. They can be defined as the offline form of chat rooms. An unlimited number of forum subjects may be formed and everyone may subscribe to any forum, participate in the discussions and improve themselves in line with their goals.
5. Glossaries of general concepts. These glossaries are to be created for each course and include the technical terms and various other terms related to the course. It will be useful if for instance the individuals who do not know these terms can reach these glossaries using certain fonts or shortcuts during a forum or chat.
6. Journal. The files and notes kept by the students as they follow a course. These can be used for evaluation at the end of the course. This is useful for student monitoring.
7. Lessons. The source files which may be used by the students asynchronously whenever they want to learn certain topics step by step. This may be more useful than live lessons with a rich multimedia support (e.g. a video file recorded during a real operation and supported with step by step explanations for a medical course). This may be designed so as to enable the students’ reach the desired topic using the next and previous buttons during the step-by-step lecture or to permit transition to the next course if the students successfully pass the short quizzes at the end of each topic.
8. Quizzes. These may be designed as multiple-choice tests, tests with one numeric answer, true or false, or fill in the blanks type. It will be possible to prepare an online quiz in a few minutes if each question is categorized in the Bloom taxonomy according to the level and outcome the question will measure and placed in the question database. The outcomes are evaluated automatically and this procedure takes a very short time.
9. Survey. These tools are used in order to obtain information from the students from time to time in orer to be used for feedback.
10. Wiki (What I know is …). Everyone may establish their own place and open it to be used by others.
11. Even attendance can be determined in the online courses. All types of interaction are kept in the logs and it can be monitored when the students enter the system, how long they stay in the system, how long does it take for the students to complete which course, how long does it take for the students to complete the quizzes, and which forums and chats they participate in. Detailed statistics can be obtained for an individual student or for the entire group.
12. Teamwork is one of the most important outcomes. Workgroups can be established and monitored more conveniently in an online course. Detailed statistics can be obtained about how the groups participate in the activities and what they do during these activities.

 

Definition page of the course should include the objectives and demanded outcomes for each course prepared in distant education. Thus, the students will be able to choose the courses in line with their goals. The students should be able to take any course without a place, time and course limitation. It should be possible to make a wide range of choices during the course selection. If the programme/ course is prepared perfectly, then it is possible to eliminate the must courses. For example, let’s assume that a programme’s outcome definition is based on the ABET criteria. ABET a Outcome questions the student’s ability to apply knowledge on maths, science and engineering. If the student is asked to reach this outcome at the application level in various courses he/she selects, then the student will take the relevant courses or learn this topic in some way even if maths is not a must course in order to reach his/her goal; because the related outcome can be reached through learning the maths subject in order to realize his/her goal. It should be noted here that the learner takes the responsibility. The important point here is to facilitate the ways to be used by the student to realize his/her goals. Thus, the instructor concept is replaced by the facilitator concept. Also the concept of term or year in the classical paradigm becomes invalid, because the time required to reach these goals depends on the individual. This process can take 2 years for certain people while 5 years may be necessary for others. The important issue is that the student should be able to graduate when he/she reaches the outcomes. The student goals and programme outcomes can be realized through the aforementioned activities, which are carried out asynchronously under the supervision of facilitators in the distant education systems.

 

Distant learning may be open to the online benefit of students for many of the programmes or may include a later campus education in some of the certificate programmes and the programmes that require practical education (e.g. vocational training). The students may receive the theoretical and part of the practical education in advance with multimedia support. And then they may complete their practical training in a centre in order to learn or reinforce the practice.

 

 

6. Conclusion

The paradigm shift in the educational field has been defined; a course design system has been described according to the new outcome-based paradigm; and the relationship between the distant education and the new paradigm has been discussed. 

 

 

References

 

1. Barker, J.A. Paradigms: The business of discovering the future. New York: Harper Business / Harper Collins Publishers.  (ISBN: 0-88730-647-0), 1993

 

2. ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology), www.abet.org

 

3. Bloom BS, Englehart MD, Furst EJ, Hill WH, and Krathwohl, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain, New York: Longman, 1956