Brigadas de Emergencia

Lecturers are central to students’ learning experiences. Biggs (1999) argues that good teaching is getting most students to use the higher cognitive level processes that the more academic students use spontaneously (p. 4). For MCD students, barriers to their human capital acquisition included lecturers’ attributes, particularly their language

constraints. Even when well qualified, expatriate academics who cannot speak Arabic must use interpreters in lectures and seminars, distorting communications and lacking subtlety in transferring information on constructs and reasoning, a process which weakens the

education process (Al-Sulayti 2002). Al-Sulayti’s finding confirmed an earlier work by Arden-Close (1999) that a major problem in Omani science lectures was the lecturers’ lack of knowledge of Omani and Arabic culture and their inability to redress this deficiency.

Further constraints, frequently mentioned, were lecturing and teaching styles of variable effectiveness. Students’ and graduates’ perceptions of MCD faculty’s knowledge- imparting styles were mixed. The practices of some lecturers promoted learning, as Unemployed Graduate 1 reported:

. . . it depends on the lecturer and how they present the content of the course. There were lecturers who did not follow a certain book, like a course we took called International Media . . . The lecturer used to give us a topic and we searched for references . . . We used to go to the ministries and the labour market to get information for our reports or try to find related items on the internet . . .We used to do presentations about those topics . . . We had debates.

Nevertheless, the traditionalist practices of rote learning from books and examinations on content rather than interpretation were continuing:

The MCD educational system has not changed, the lecturers depend on traditional teaching (Unemployed Graduates 3, 4, 9) although

… some (Omani lecturers) are really good. (Unemployed graduates 3, 5, 9) The traditional teaching issue is an interview theme for student experiences, as it underscores the change facing MCD’s traditionalist culture absorbed from its environment, a matter discussed in chapter 7. The students and graduates reiterated the lack of

engagement by lecturers for the welfare of some students, for dialogue and argument during lectures, for consistency in marking assignments and examinations, for critical analysis of the media, for English fluency in delivering lectures in that language. However, the participants were frequently positive regarding the emerging new generation of Omani lecturers. There was one comment on gender – that the last female lecturer was appointed in 1996.

Another issue regarding standards concerned the students’ training on the new equipment in the MCD media laboratories. Two participants, a fourth-year student and a graduate public sector employee, commented on their technical training, one stating:

The trainers themselves needed training . . . on the operation of the equipment. We did not find them qualified or knowledgeable with this training (Unemployed Graduate 4).

Of concern to undergraduates were in-course assignments, usually submitted at the end of each semester. Partly because of the timing, lecturers did not give students feedback

on the assignments, and at times the work was not returned. An unemployed graduate (7) commented:

Actually, they never return our research assignments. Some of the students insist on getting feedback from the lecturers, but some (lecturers) refuse to return our research papers.

Another participant concurred: assignments were due and submitted ten days or less before the end of the semester, and the undergraduates assumed that their lecturers thus had insufficient time to assess thirty assignments effectively. A further contentious topic concerning assignments was a course subject, Research Methods, delivered in the last year of the course, thus successfully negating undergraduates’ previous assignments’ structures and content. As noted in s5.2 above, students showed dissatisfaction with the standards for curricula, that there was little priority given to the placement of subjects in the course, thus reflecting on their absorption of knowledge and their ability to build human capital in a coherent mass communications learning structure.

In an analysis of frequently conflicting data on lecturers’ performances, the first observation is that mass communications faculty were sourced from diverse backgrounds, Omani, Arab or elsewhere. As such, they displayed a continuum of beliefs on methods of imparting knowledge, opposing attitudes (example: a holistic approach to students’ development versus a book learning approach), different lecturing styles (conceptualising or rote learning) and certainly evinced variable levels of responsibility toward their students. Whilst such variety of backgrounds and styles may be salutary from a diversity viewpoint, the outcome is not desirable either for the university’s social capital

accumulation or its students for their human capital acquisition. The university has an image, an intrinsic quality, and its community expects high standards of procedure and outcomes from it – a form of civil society embedded in the country’s social capital development. To illustrate this image, the policymakers were lyrical in their expectations for future Omani leaders, professionals and entrepreneurs in mass media whom they expect to embark from SQU’s lecture halls.

In contradiction to society’s expectations, all categories of participants criticised the mass communications course standards either directly or indirectly, and as noted, the faculty bore the brunt of the criticism. The traditional Arabic pedagogy is rote learning and governments are slowly moving away from iteration to cognitive development as extant education theory expands among the GCC countries. ‘Older’ lecturers, particularly in

youthful Oman, are steeped in Arab tradition and suspicious of the information explosion they experience. Another factor is language fluency and the Arts College lecture halls, as the remaining bastions of Arabic, attract the traditionalist lecturers. Thus, with the older lecturers and the ‘new’ Omani lecturers, students and graduates experience the country’s crossover of cultures from tradition to globalisation, albeit containing imported traditions. However, the Omani lecturers were frequently recent alumni of the mass communications course, aware of the weaknesses in lecturing styles and addressing those issues; but perhaps less experienced in the world of work of the private sector mass media industry. Academic satisfaction directly affected students' approaches to structural learning and the cohorts thus accrued more human risk capital than they envisaged or which they could overcome.