Abstract
The Higher Education Institutions are training units where the development of skills and competence of labor force is made. As human capital is the most valuable asset to lead the competitiveness challenges of todays global economy, the education Institutions focus on providing higher quality level in the learning environment; as well as research structures where scientists and technologists are qualified to make the higher scientific outcomes. The higher Arab Education Institutes suffers to the same challenges in terms of quality, access and relevance of educational knowledge. To overcome these challenge, it is now a widely held view that efforts should be made to link research and teaching together, in the learning process. Saudi Arabia has always been interested in the future of education. Many investments are done to build advanced educational institution and qualified curriculums according to the international accreditations. Beside that, efforts started to be done to create relationship between teaching and research. This paper reports the first teaching experience in Saudi Arabia that aim to apply Research-led teaching.
The ultimate goal as university teacher is to develop and enhance the student learning experience to promote student retention, engagement, and achievement. Underpinning this ambition; a new innovative research-led teaching experience was applied in the Information System Department Ladies section of College of Computer and Information Science at King Saud University. The targeted audience are the women of postgraduate studies in Master and PhD level. The aim of this approach is to encourage student achievement, to enable them to become creative and critical thinkers with the capacity to learn both independently and collaboratively, and to engender a life-long interest in learning. Our research-led strategy consists to integrate the research outcomes in the whole learning process. The course is designed to integrate the scientific research activities that are related to course's topics. We introduce a new approach in assessment process that include as well as traditional written exams, an evaluation based on research outcomes presented in open seminar series. The students are asked to select research field that cover one or more topics of the courses. Then, under the same select topic, students are required to produce three main outcomes: a research paper, project and presentation, where the students present their work during an open seminar. However, to achieve these results, the students should work in collaboration and cooperation. The student's research should focus on the impact of the chosen approach and give them a framework for their project. This repeating topic evaluation encourages students to use both online and printed materials. We have provided guidelines for managing teams and encouraging students to build their analytical and teamwork skills. Research projects are designed to encourage students to conduct research and find out for themselves the added value of course topics in the real world topics. These projects help students develop leadership skills and the discipline for working in groups and submitting a report that is professional, punctual, and represents team view collectively. This methodology was applied in two courses of postgraduate levels: PhD and Master. The results will be presented in detail in this paper.