CHED and new courses

Since I have been handling Quality Assessment Teams for CHED-NCR (NQAT) for years now, I have something to say about an issue raised recently by the Commission on Science, Technology and Engineering (COMSTE).

COMSTE recommends that CHED should not measure the quality of a school by the number of teachers it has.

When a school applies for a permit to open a new major course, it has to prove to the NQAT that it has at least two full-time teachers with at least a master’s degree in the field of the major. Very few schools, however, can find master’s degree holders in fields that are innovative, such as fashion design or animation. For this reason, most schools do not want to propose innovative courses, thus defeating one of the key purposes of CHED, which is to develop new fields of study.

Many schools cannot even find teachers with graduate degrees in popular fields, such as psychology or mass communication. I have myself disapproved the requests of many schools on the basis of this particular CHED requirement.

True, it makes no sense for a school to offer an undergraduate course if all its teachers are mere undergraduate degree holders. A graduate degree guarantees some sort of professionalism, and a doctoral degree guarantees that the teacher has done original research and pushed the frontiers of knowledge.

What should be done, however, is to get away from the either-or situation and say that CHED should still require a minimum number of teachers with graduate degrees, but should allow exceptions for innovative courses. The computer game business, for example, has the highest growth rate among IT-related industries; we should be offering A.B. Game Design even if there are no graduate degree holders yet in the field.

PLAGIARISM (continued from last week): On a very sophisticated level, when a writer uses a passage from a famous writer and the work is meant to be read by specialists (as happens with literary theory), there can be no plagiarism. For example, if you wrote in an article in an ISI literature journal that the words in a poem have meanings that deliberately contradict the meaning of the whole poem, you are merely repeating the thoughts of famous critics such as Cleanth Brooks and Jacques Derrida. Everyone reading an ISI literature journal has read Brooks and Derrida, so there is no danger that the thought will be attributed to you. This is one reason, by the way, that there are very few footnotes in high-level literary theory journals.

QUESTION FOR BPAP: I have a question for the Business Processing Association Philippines (BPAP), which has come out with an excellent roadmap (available on their website) for the offshoring and outsourcing industry. The roadmap specifies that the industry should be “tapping alternative labor pools – including housewives, retirees, nongraduates, and career-switchers – [to] broaden the overall supply of talent; most important here is the opportunity to develop the 75 percent of all available talent that presently resides outside the National Capital Region, which is not being fully leveraged by the industry.”

Why, then, is BPAP asking universities in NCR to prepare graduates to join call centers, when these universities do not have housewives, retirees, nongraduates, and career-switchers and, at most, can supply only 25% of what the industry needs anyway?

Instead, NCR universities should be doing what the best universities elsewhere in the world are doing, namely, doing research and development (R&D) rather than preparing students for jobs that can be done by housewives and retirees. Stanford, one of the top universities in the world, does not prepare students to work in call centers, but does so much research that it created Silicon Valley and practically the entire computer industry as we know it today. Without computers, we would not even have IT outsourcing.

The Philippines should be pioneering in IT, not just catching up with India’s call center industry.

“WORDS OF THE DAY” (English/Filipino) for next week’s elementary school classes: Sept. 22 Monday: 1. food/langaw, 2. ring/langoy, 3. straight/laon (old), 4. about/lapad, 5. muscle/lagda, 6. conscious/laplap; Sept. 23 Tuesday: 1. hear/mani, 2. roll/matsing, 3. strange/masdan, 4. money/manunggal, 5. present/mangkok, 6. canvas/mangmang; Sept. 24 Wednesday: 1. help/manok, 2. roof/mura (unripe), 3. street/munggo, 4. little/manibalang, 5. needle/mutya (pearl), 6. poison/moras; Sept. 25 Thursday: 1. hard/mangga, 2. room/mura (cheap), 3. stretch/mumog, 4. transport/mana, 5. order/manatili, 6. driving/musang; Sept. 26 Friday: 1. high/mata, 2. root/mual, 3. strong/malat, 4. trouble/mistula, 5. owner/maong, 6. yesterday/mamalis. The numbers after the dates indicate grade level. The dates refer to the official calendar for public elementary schools. For definitions of the words in Filipino, consult UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino.