Bologna Process1 is the pedagogical2 method that has been adopted by most European Universities. It encourages the credit collection method by the students. Once they fulfill the required amount of credit points they can graduate from that school. This process has the advantage of giving the flexibility of choosing subjects to the students so they can, with the help of advisors, choose their learning path and future carrier.
In Kurdistan Region, we have started to adopt this process too. Particularly in our department, “Software Engineering department” we are more than enthusiastic about this process as now we can enable our students to choose different paths for their carrier by picking among the available subjects so that they can specialize in different fields of software development and engineering.
However, this change might take some time due to multiple reasons first is purely technical, as with every change, there are always obstacles to overcome, and perks to understand so that we can implement the process fully with no problems. There is much training that has to happen for the teachers, staff, and students. As well as implementing a new software process that supports this kind of semester-based credit collection instead of annual passing of the subjects.
The second issue that we have is resistance to change. Some other departments and colleges hate this new process. This hate mostly originates from two sources, first, they love the status quo and do not want to roam into new territories, second, they do not comprehend the benefits of the process for their college/department and see the old process as more fit for their needs.
The third problem with this system is resources. By resources, I mean more staff, lecturers, lecture rooms, and laboratories. These are essential for the most important part of the process which is letting students choose subjects. This means we have to offer more subjects that cover students’ desires, this needs more lectures, then students’ choices might be disproportionate. This means there will be a need for bigger lecture rooms for some subjects. And also we need a more dynamic computer lab that can cope with the changes of the subjects. In my online interview with the prime minister, I addressed some of these issues, and his responses were positive to help us to overcome them.
So while our enthusiasm in our department might help to adopt this process on a very small scale and limited scope. However, for a larger and faster adoption rate, we need government intervention by dedicating an appropriate budget for this implementation and transitioning from the old to the new process.
There is no need to wait multiple years to see the advantages of this process as it is obvious from now. The students that are started with the Bologna process, are already reporting a better satisfaction ratio in the surveys, and teacher report higher grades for their students as they are choosing subjects according to their passion and abilities.
FootNote
The Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area ↩
Pedagogy and pedagogue come from the Greek paidos “boy, child” plus agogos “leader.” Pedagogy refers to the teaching profession as well as the science of education, for example as a college subject. This might be one reason that the word, pedagogue, is often used for a teacher who is overly interested in rules and details, hence the science of teaching, rather than actually getting through to his or her students.Source. ↩