Friday 19 / April / 2024
Muscat: Digitisation could be the way to encourage Oman’s current generation of students to develop more interest in studies, the head of a top digital consultancy firm in the Sultanate said.
According to Shatha Al Maskiry, Managing Director of Protiviti Oman, given the ease with which the current generation operates technology, schools must adapt to the current technological climate.
“Educational institutions are all facing similar challenges and one of them is the lack of funding, which results in tightened spending. Digitisation isn’t cheap but institutions do not have much of a choice. They need to study the relevant technological interventions needed and step out of the mindset that digitisation is about purchasing tons of technology solutions or forcing educators to use it,” Al Maskiry said. She had been invited to provide her insights on the topic “Risks in the Digital Age” at the Risk Management Conference, 2018, organised by Sultan Qaboos University.
“It will only work if educators are supported by management to be the drivers for digitisation. The real challenge is that some educators are not too keen to embrace technology. This is not unique to teaching but is relevant to almost every profession. Everyone has to be tech savvy in the 21st century. Literacy is not about just being qualified. IT literacy already exists among students, who know more than us. We need to align ourselves and develop teaching methods that address their needs and, subsequently, the job market’s needs,” she added.
Implementation of technology could provide students with a deeper learning, helping them to better understand concepts that they would one day use at the workplace, she remarked.
“Technology has to be embedded in teaching like it already is at workplaces in various industries. This mindset applies to all stakeholders, from top to bottom, in the education sector. The top administration of any institution must be a role model with a strategic mindset to develop an ecosystem enabled by technology. The key challenge and potential risk lies in human resources. All stakeholders need to integrate technology but not be enslaved by it. Educators must drive it in a manner that they can measure how it enhances learning,” Al Maskiry added.
“Use big data to understand students’ performance and discover the best methods on how to incorporate bots, virtual assistants, mobile learning, social learning, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and augmented reality, among other technologies, to lessen the effort of intensive tasks,” she further explained.
“Enhance the learning experience and improve the overall quality of education. At the end of the day, technology will always be available, but the key risks and opportunities lie in our hands,” she noted.
With e-learning becoming a standard mode of operation in universities across the world, Al Maskiry expressed the belief that it will only be a matter of time before Omani institutions embrace digital technology.
“When I was studying in university, everything was done online. If I missed out on a lecture or a presentation, I could always find a video or a PowerPoint slideshow of it online. There was hardly any submission of physical assignments. This made it so convenient for all of us to study. And we’re talking here about something that I experienced years ago. This is now a challenge that educational institutions face not just in Oman, but across the world,” Al Maskiry noted.
“Sometimes, even something as simple as an admission form needs to be physically filled in and submitted. So, maybe that would be one of the first things that could have an online version. Distance learning today is not just the future, but the present, because of the ease of connectivity. I believe everyone needs to embrace this to move forward,” she added.
According to data from the National Centre for Statistics and Information, as of 2015-16, there were 567,607 students in Oman’s schools. Of them, 8 per cent were in private schools while the rest were in public schools.
