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By Ami Moyal
President, Afeka College of Engineering
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The early months of 2023 have not been kind to the tech industry. In the U.S. alone, nearly 500 companies have let go of over 150,000 employees since the year began. In addition to bank failures, inflation and talk of a recession have given many industries pause as to what best practices should be put in place moving forward.
Meanwhile, the aftermath of COVID-19 has continued to send shockwaves through the higher education industry. What it means to learn in a post-pandemic world is a challenge many higher education leaders are still coming to terms with.
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Amid declines in undergraduate enrollment in the U.S. — although the declines are slowing and approaching pre-pandemic levels — students and parents are asking whether a traditional college experience even remains the right pathway after high school.
Employers, on the other hand, have a higher regard for the value of higher education. The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has found that while only 48% of the general public has "a great deal" or "quite a bit" of confidence in higher education, 67% of employers have the same levels of confidence. Employers are seeking to hire people who are capable of hitting the ground running and who possess the analytical and social skills to thrive in the workplace without significant oversight.
As such, a pedagogical paradigm shift is needed not only to make students excited about higher education, but to ensure that once they leave our classrooms, they are equipped with the tools they need to succeed in an ever-evolving job market.
Steps in a Curricular Transformation
True curricular transformation is a journey where an institution's course and program coordinators create opportunities for sharing and exchanging opinions and methods among faculty members, while relying on student feedback, and later on evaluation data, to ultimately integrate skills acquisition into the educational process. For the past five years, at Afeka Academic College of Engineering in Tel Aviv, we have implemented a gradual, extended and multi-pronged curricular transformation that is multidisciplinary in nature and looks at the student as a holistic individual.
In our process, we adapted the same principles of engineering design methodology that are used in the high-tech industry to develop products. These principles include "ask," "imagine, "plan," "create," "experiment" and "improve." These design principles can be applied to any institution's curricular change process, across all disciplines.
This process needs to start long before syllabi are drafted. It begins when faculty members discuss goals, teaching methods and the purpose of each course. It is no longer acceptable in 2023 to say, "We are doing it this way because this is how it's always been done." If recent years have taught us anything, it is that we need to expect the unexpected.
While this may seem like an uphill battle, the silver lining is that reimagining pedagogy can and should be a collaborative process where trial and error is to be expected, and learning from our mistakes can only lead to more positive results in the long run.
The Importance of a Graduate Profile
To this end, academic institutions can develop a "graduate profile" to make sure their education is aimed at instilling students with not only knowledge, but the professional and personal skills needed to succeed in the workforce. The profile acts as a guiding framework for enacting sweeping change across all disciplines within the institution.
What should the graduate profile look like? A good graduate profile:
- takes into account personal skills like reading comprehension, critical thinking, self-learning and teamwork
- encourages and at times requires students to enroll in extracurricular activities to become well-rounded individuals
- explores ways to redesign the physical space of a classroom (and other learning spaces) to make room for technological innovation and different pedagogy as needed
- requires reaching out to other good faith actors both within the educational system and in the world of industry and NGOs to enhance multidisciplinary learning experiences
Essentially, the graduate profile evaluates the progression of skills acquisition for each individual student during every step of the educational process. This can be painstaking. After all, if the acquisition of personal skills is the foundation of the graduate profile, it stands to reason that acquiring such skills takes time. Then, after every milestone, institutions can assess what skills have successfully been acquired and where educational gaps remain.
Institutional leaders must ask two questions at every juncture: Are they successfully working towards understanding the demands of the industry they wish to enter? And, will newly admitted students be able to acquire all the skills they will need by the time they graduate?
While it may seem like envisioning an ideal graduate of an educational process is a subjective endeavor, it can actually be relatively objective if the process is driven by data — namely, research based on global reports and surveys that assess current job market trends.
Some examples of compelling prior surveys include the AAC&U's aforementioned report, as well as the 2021 World Economic Forum Global Taxonomy, which surveyed employers on the skills the job market expects from post-secondary education. The skills highlighted in the survey results include critical thinking, complex problem solving, ethical judgment, written and oral communication, civic engagement, creativity, originality, initiative and more. With time, my team has concluded that these skills are not only useful in the workforce, but they enhance the educational process as well, leading to better learning outcomes.
Final Thoughts
While Afeka College's own journey revolves around adapting to the dynamic world of engineering — a discipline built on rediscovery and innovation — our curricular transformation process is applicable for various other disciplines and industries, none of which can avoid the need for a seismic mindset shift in today's chaotic economy and post-pandemic world.
Times are changing, but we do not need to panic; we just need to change with them.
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