How to Help your Employees, Administrators, and Students Understand What Unites Them - and What Makes Them Unique

INTRODUCTION

 

A major problem with the educational delivery of Oman, a country that has only even had its first university since 1986, has been that a lot of frameworks for education were simply imported from either neighbouring lands or from the West. Some of these self-imposed structures were beneficial in early stages of development of Oman, but they no longer serve Omanis well, especially in today's changing job market (Stoda, 2012). Many educators today particularly lament in the universities of the country the negative washback that the summative- or high-stakes exams have had on learning, especially in the area of students' failures to acquire important lifelong social- and work-related skills. The major focus of too many students and instructors throughout the land (LeRoux 2011; Pocaro & Musawi, 2012) have been on numbers or marks--not on deepening of practice and meaningful skills acquisition outside the traditional classroom design imported to Oman since the 1970s.

 

LeRoux, Pocaro/Musawi, and various Omani Ministries, such as the ministry that oversee the Omani Academic Accreditation Authority (OAAA, 2009a, b) have advocated that continuous assessments be implemented to a much wider extent than has been the practice over the past quarter of century. The four major reasons for this shift have been outlined by LeRoux as:

 

(1) Continuous assessments are in line with current international trends in assessment theory.

(2) Sociologically-speaking continuous assessments, such as conducted in simulations and on projects, are more sociologically appropriate in Oman, which has historically known an apprenticeship system as the major means of skill acquisition.

(3) Regular or continuous assessments are also statistically more reliable than the Omani high stakes or summative evaluations have been.

(4) Students need to acquire more advanced and less-passive study skills in order to do well academically and in whatever field of work they desire to be involved in.

 

This paper advocates particularly that the employment of more simulations be created and used by the educational institutions, the Ministry of Manpower, and in training programs of all-sorts across the land. [1]

 

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