Learning-centered education -- a prerequisite?
By Nirwan Idrus
JAKARTA (JP): Various management principles conclude that to be successful, an organization must first have the products and/or services that customers want. Second, that organization must be able to deliver them to customers with the quality expectations the latter desire. If these are not enough, the organization and all in it must be totally committed to customer service if it wants commercial success.
Learning or learner-centered education is essentially a manifestation of the above tenets in the education sphere. It emphasizes the recipients' needs and wants out of educational services. Inevitably, the question arises on who these educational service customers really are.
Both educators and the public have discussed this question. One can argue that students cannot be the customer, as they are part and parcel of the educational system. Can they be the customer and the "raw material" at the same time?
Others would argue that customers of educational services must be the industries that will employ the graduates, while the graduates are simply the products of the educational system.
Whatever and whoever the customers of the educational services are, the point is that by people talking about learning -- or learner-centered education -- the concept of customer-orientation in education is reasonably well established.
This is important from at least two points of view. The first is the recognition that education does have customers and that they are important to the success of the business of education. The second is that people are beginning to accept that education is nothing but a business, and therefore must sink or swim like any other enterprise.
From here on, the term learning-centered will be used also for the term learner-centered education (LCE).
At the outset, it must be said that LCE is only part of an overall scheme of upgrading our higher educational institutions. Which is to say that to import LCE into the institutions and expect that it will improve the quality of the institutions on its own is naive.
LCE is but one of several "tools" that will need to be implemented in concert with other management tools. We all know that a higher education institution is made of a myriad of elements including curricula, equipment, lecturers, technicians, laboratory technicians as well as rectors and janitors.
Improving such an institution must therefore involve all these aspects, with everyone contributing to the institution and every facet that has an impact on the institution.
Indeed, LCE is one of the core values of a higher education institution. The others, as adapted from the Malcolm Baldrige criteria, are leadership, continuous improvement and organizational learning, staff development that is broader than discipline based and, last but not least, partnership development. Each can obviously be expanded and further developed, but clearly these five core values must simultaneously exist in an organization in order for it to derive the optimal quality.
Appropriate leadership is central to the efficacy of the organization. Even in education we need a leader who can foresee the future, coach the "troops" toward the flexibility that is needed, who is a team builder, results oriented, sensitive to the needs of the external and internal customers and who is fully committed to continuous quality improvement.
Continuous improvement clearly says what it means. Organization learning is the capacity for the organization, in our case the higher education institution, to continually learn new things and unlearn old habits that are no longer appropriate for the objectives in hand.
Failed organizations are those that fail to learn. Reasons such as complacency, bureaucratic, sluggishness and lack of long- term objectives have been cited as contributing to their failures. A successful organization is therefore one that continually learns about newer things that affect it and unlearns those things that inhibit their own growth and development to overcome problems and control their future.
From discussions with leaders of Indonesian higher education institutions and Ministry of Education and Culture officials, it is clear that staff development in their minds only pertains to obtaining S2 and/or S3 or postgraduate degrees.
If this was ever a definition of staff development, it certainly is no longer appropriate. Indeed, elsewhere this had not been a definition for staff development for a long time.
For example, in Australia and New Zealand one cannot hope to become a lecturer in many fields now without a PhD. The practice in Indonesia is that a lecturer is "appointed" from among recent graduates in S1 and then trained for the S2 degree prior to taking up lecturing tasks.
The Malcolm Baldrige Award criteria obviously see this situation as being some way from first base. When lecturers and other higher education "workers" are able to develop themselves in fields other than their own, then the core value is achieved.
Partnership development is a situation resembling Stephen Covey's ultimate community relationship, which he called "interdependence", having come through the stages of dependence and independence. A quality higher education institution must have interdependent relationships with its organizational colleague because only through such a relationship can it derive the benefits of synergy for all concerned.
To come back to LCE as a core value of a higher education institution is to adopt a number of fundamental things, which include but are not limited to the following:
* It must set high expectations and standards. Human nature is such that rarely, if ever, it exceeds either. Therefore, the higher these are set, the higher will the results be. Low expectations will produce a lower result.
* It must accept that students learn in different ways and, importantly, at different rates. Various solutions to this are now available whether using or not using high technology. Only if we accept this and do something about it will we begin to raise our overall quality, since no students will fail and resources will be totally well utilized.
* It must practice active learning. This gets the students involved in their own learning, empowers them to make decisions about it and entices them to take responsibility, a situation which they will need to face in the real world. It is not unrealistic to expect students to keep coming back to the university or polytechnic to upgrade their knowledge and skills as the world progresses with newer technology.
* It must practice formative assessments. All assessments must be for the development of the students and should not be used and meant to penalize them for being different in their rates of learning and ways of learning, or for any other deficiencies which are not necessarily their fault.
* In the long run, it must help students to gain the ability to self-assess. In the Indonesian context perhaps this should really start with the lecturers first because if they are unable or unused to carrying out self-assessment on themselves, how can they be expected to coach their students to do so.
* It must focus on key transitions, that is, for example, the transition from high school to university or tertiary education. Many people are traumatized by such transitions. This may include the change from Covey's dependence to independence and undoubtedly this requires support from the institution.
* It must conscientiously design quality and prevention (remember prevention is better than the cure) into its systems.
* It must practice management by facts.
* It must have a long-range view of the future if it wishes to survive in the increasingly competitive globalized world.
* It must have public responsibility and citizenship and cannot expect to do all the above without these. Increasingly, only organizations that are responsible about the environment, about their people, about their place in the immediate surroundings and which are good citizens will survive. The community is now so sophisticated and educated that tokenness in these areas will soon be uncovered.
* It must be flexible and be able to provide prompt and fast responses. Given that those organizations that want to practice quality also practice Jidoka (stop the line and get to the bottom of the problem), a slow response to problems being faced will mean stopping the production line for too long. In the process, the organization will lose out.
* Finally, it must be results oriented. Higher education institutions are no longer ivory towers. They are no longer protected by mystique or reverence. They are simply another organization that will have to do things that other organizations do to survive.
If we are serious about upgrading the quality of our higher education institutions, then we have to adopt not only learning- centered education, but the whole core values alluded to above. Nevertheless, they also show a learning-centered education has a much broader meaning than others may suggest.
The writer is an engineering and higher education consultant in Jakarta. This article is a personal opinion.