Dissertation

Teaching and professional development in transnational education in Oman

Antonia Lamers, PhD at ICLON, researched how to create a TNE teaching and learning environment that is in line with the expectations of the British programmes offered to students in Oman.

Author

Antonia Lamers-Reeuwijk

Date

24 November 2020

Links

Fulltext in Leiden Repository

The number of transnational students  is quite substantial in Oman. In the Gulf Region, it is common to recruit non-Anglophone expatriate staff to teach on these programmes while they rarely have prior experience in a Western university.

In Oman, expatriate academics form a considerable majority of the teaching staff in transnational education (TNE). This means that for practically all of them the environment in which they teach is academically, culturally and sometimes also linguistically new to them. The same holds for the students as the vast majority come from the local government schools where Arabic is the medium of instruction in both primary and secondary school, and the British academic system is new to them.

This raises the questions of how a TNE teaching and learning environment can be created that is in line with the expectations of the British programmes so that students can succeed academically, and secondly, how  academics who teach on these programmes can be supported in their professional practice towards creating such an environment.

The study took a holistic approach by investigating this environment from the points of view of an observer, the teachers and the students, and considered how these different perspectives informed a long-term continuing professional development (CPD) programme.