There are units in campus syllabus that leave students scratching their heads.
Take Moi University for instance. Here, media science/journalism students must study ‘Subject Indexing and Thesaurus Construction,’ a unit about how to construct indexes. Many students have no idea what this is. Still at Moi, students studying Business Management have a unit called ‘Health Awareness’ — its photocopied handouts cost a pocket-destroying Sh700.
Then enters the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery course at the University of Nairobi which has ‘Junior Clerkship’ — it’s taught for an annoying 180 hours!
Over at Kenyatta University, students studying for a bachelor of science in Chemistry have a unit called ‘Cost Accounting,’ while those pursuing bachelor of science in Computer Science have to contend with ‘Phase Equilibria’— a chemistry based subject!
Dr Sam Kamau, Curriculum Developer at Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Mass Communication says: “In designing a curriculum, there are thoughts that go into it. There could be a rational reason to each of those units.”
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“But education is an evolving thing. The Commission for Higher Education says you should review the courses after every five years for relevance.” Dr Kamau adds: He notes that, “A unit may have existed in 2005, but is totally irrelevant today. Someone may have had a reason to include it back then.
But this is not unique to Kenya. At the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the Department of English has the ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’ unit for creative writing students. No text books. Just laptops and Wi-Fi.
The Writing Department at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles has the ‘Selfie Class’ which was actually called “Writing 150: Writing and Critical Reasoning: Identity and Diversity.” One assignment asked students to take five selfies of themselves and write an essay on: “How do your selfies produce or obscure a sense of your identity?”
New Jersey’s Rutgers University runs a ‘Politicising Beyonce’ course which is studied to answer the question:”Can Beyonce?’s music be seen as a blueprint for progressive social change?”
See, it’s a changing world.
