The quantity versus quality dilemma in Syrian higher education today : a study to enhance the quality of teaching and learning at the department of English at Damascus university

Abstract EN

Very large public universities, an inadequately developed public sector, and a rapid growth in the number of students seeking higher education are some of the challenges facing higher education in Syria today.

The government’s ‘open admission policy’ has committed itself to securing ‘free access’ to higher education to every secondary school graduate.

For this policy to continue and be successful and for the country and students to benefit, significant changes are needed, or else, the quality of teaching and learning in such massive contexts where minimal resources are available will continue to recede.

Such circumstances besides the technological developments in the world today also make it imperative that the concept of education should be moving towards helping learners acquire the skills of self-directed learning and develop the attitude that learning is a life-long process.

This study shall attempt to look for potential answers to quality education at the department of English language and literature at Damascus University where the number of EFL (English as a foreign language) undergraduate students in 2009 was around 13,000 with a student-lecturer ratio of around 500:1.

The answer to quality education in such massive departments might simply lie in approaches to teaching that promote autonomy.

Non-conventional modes of learning might also hold a lot of the answers to this dilemma.

However, in a culture where teachers themselves have not been exposed to the concept of ‘autonomization’ and in a context with a traditional organization of classrooms, implementing such approaches to teaching may not be that simple.

The changes needed mainly depend on training the current faculty to adopt non-conventional means of teaching and to hand over some of their responsibilities and focus instead on enhancing the learning process by developing their learners’ cognitive, metacognitive, and socio-affective skills.