***Th
e
The v followin
g
i
repre ews expre article is
s
s
of St ent the v sed here not an o
ffi
ate, o
ie
a
r any ws of th re entire cial Fulb
ri
ly
e Ful
of its
brigh those o ght Prog
partn
f
r
t Pro
er or
gram its autho am articl
ganiz
r
e.
, the
ation
U.S. D and do no
s.***
t
epar
tmen
t
each) across all faculties should be kept and posted somewhere
online for all students to access. Furthermore, developing an online
system in which students can access syllabi and other material
with appropriate copyright permissions for distribution, might also
help students gain a greater sense of independence and calm with
regards to accessing course materials and managing their work
load.
If standard, detailed information is posted in a set location accessible
to all students (e.g. online), then both students and staff will greatly
benefit. Students will no longer need to hound secretaries with
the same set of questions: “Is Professor X here today? When will
he/she come? Will he/she be long? Will he/she be here tomorrow?
When are exams happening? How will we be notified?” Secretaries,
in turn, can focus on their administrative tasks at hand, instead
of answering questions that students can easily find online.
Furthermore, professors and administrators would not be bogged
down with conflicts of organization (e.g. setting schedules, making
sure that classroom times and locations do not clash, etc.) because
these would be taken care of centrally, by a central office, to which
all students and staff could refer.
Of course, such a change would require technological investment,
and in a country still in transition, everything comes down to
economics. However, if universities invested in centralizing their
information in a transparent fashion, they would function with
greater efficiency in all aspects: in determining the number of hours
the university itself functions (and therefore pays its employees)
per year, in maximizing its use of classrooms, in allowing the
development of interdisciplinary courses, in fostering greater interdepartmental communications, etc. If the university invested in
this aspect, it would ultimately be a well-oiled academic machine,
which will allow it to determine how to cut costs while increasing
university profits, to be used for further educational investment.
The second major difference, from which many other
differences stem between American and Albanian systems of
higher education, is a remnant of the old communist system,
which still haunts Albanian education to some extent, and
which recently arose in a conversation with a friend: the
concept of professor as an “authority of knowledge.” Of
course, not all Albanian teachers maintain this train of thought,
and of course, not all American educators have shed this train of
thought. However, American universities tend to encourage student
participation in the creation of new academic knowledge. Many
Albanian academics also encourage this model. However, I imagine
that it is admittedly more difficult to be entirely open to student
input in an Albanian cultural context. From what I have gathered,
educators were very much authority figures during communist
times: they brought knowledge to the population. In a population
whose knowledge was regulated—only approved information was
given—educators were the keys to knowing anything within the
By: Krisela