Seward Incorporated

Despite recent investments in and rapid modernization of university campuses in places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia,higher education in the Middle East still faces many obstacles. One of the greatest has been a fundamental disconnect between education and employment, a possible factor contributing to many of the recent riots in the Arab World. In 2008 the World Bank highlighted the massive unemployment among college graduates across the Middle East and suggested that the traditional instructivist teaching methods long dominant there — which emphasize lecture, rote memorization, and high-stakes testing — have done little to prepare graduates for work in the knowledge economy of the 21st century.
 

Many experts agree that building knowledge societies requires improving students’ abilities to think for themselves, weigh competing claims, argue their position with others, and work together to solve problems. One powerful way of increasing the opportunities for students to develop these skills and habits of mind in formal courses is computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). This article examines the effects of introducing CSCL into a Middle Eastern undergraduate course and the cultural, institutional, and societal factors to consider for sustainable design.

The article was published on December 15, 2011 and can be found online here.

 

David S. Porcaro, Ph.D., is an expert instructional designer with experience in designing and evaluating technology integration projects for preservice teachers, with a regional focus on the Middle East and Africa.  In 2007, he led an international team of students in Brazil and American in the design and development of a multicultural learning object.  Since 2007 he has researched the factors contributing to the successful introduction of a computer-supported collaborative learning environment in a teacher training program in Muscat, Oman.  He spent the 2009-2010 academic year as a Fulbright Fellow in Oman, where he gathered data and taught courses in the college of education. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Near Eastern Studies and Ph.D. degree in Learning, Design and Technology. He has worked or studied in the US, Israel/Palestine, Oman, the UAE, Morocco, the UK, and the Netherlands.