Emboldened students and fearsome students

Embolded students (ES) spend a lot of money to enroll for Advanced Degree programme study, especially those that have relatively short programme duration. ES are busy people and they skip classes very often. They do try their best to do their assignments with very tight time constraint and resource constraint. and, very often, their teachers also try their best to give them a pass. They are treated as customers and customers are "kings". The main concerns of the education centre are (a) how many customers the centre can get and (b) how to facilitate these customers to pass their subjects, given that these students have difficulties to read academic articles, have little time to read textbooks, and have poor writing skills. When their coursework quality is challenged by the second marker(s) or external examiner(s), they will appeal. Sometimes, if ES are "forced" to sit for closed-book internal exam, they will boycott the exam.

The product positioning of the education centre's degree programme is based on (i) short-duration of study, (ii) low-risk  of failure, (iii) loose enrollment criteria,(iv) "reasonable workload of study, (v) responsive customer support, (vi) affordable school fees, and (vii) "recognized" advanced academic qualifications.

Fearsome students (FS) need to study open exam, typically in the field of Accounting. Since recognized professional qualification is exam-based, they have to study and prepare for the open professional exam. They have no choice in this respect; nevertheless, they are worried, thus they are fearsome students. Some education centres offer study programmes to help these students in their study. These study programmes are informative. However, they tend to develop study materials that further simplify the learning materials from study pads - in essence, they simplify study materials from simplified materials. This facilitates students to better memorize the exam study materials but do not facilitate genuine learning; learning becomes a task, not an enjoyable experience any more.

Education centres attract students to study for their programmes because students have difficulties to study by themselves; and they enroll for these study programmes because students are worried. Thus, these centres run intensive workshops to teach students on these subjects examined in professional exam; they then offer even more intensive revision workshops to the FS; finally, they run the ultimate version of intensive workshops for the FS... In short, the product positioning of these education centre is based on (i) students' fear on exam. and (ii) students' inability to study by themselves. Consequently, students who adopt this route of professional development have difficulties to develop learning skill that generate inspiring and enjoyable learning experience.





N.B.

From what I can tell, universities are standing firmer on maintaining their academic standard while education centres are getting looser in their student recruitment effort; as a result, there will be fewer students enrolled and more students' "customers" complaints in their study. The education system will muddle through in highly conflictual mode... which has very little to do with learning effectiveness per se.