The study, published in Discover Education by Mohammad Qasim Farooqi and Najibullah Habibi of Badghis University, explored how English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers at three Afghan public universities experience the implementation of OBE. The researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with nine male EFL teachers who were purposively selected because they had served both as OBE trainers and as university lecturers. Female teachers could not be recruited because, following the regime change, they were no longer teaching in Afghan higher education. Interviews were held online via WhatsApp audio calls in October and November 2023, lasted roughly fifty minutes each, and were conducted in English or Persian depending on the participant’s preference. The researchers stopped recruiting after the ninth interview because no new themes emerged, a sign that data saturation had been reached.

The interviews were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s six-phase reflexive thematic analysis, interpreted through the lens of institutional theory. That theoretical framework, developed by organizational sociologist W. Richard Scott, describes institutional environments in terms of three pillars: regulative structures such as laws and policies, normative structures such as professional values, and cultural-cognitive structures such as shared assumptions about what is feasible. When a new reform clashes with these pillars, organizations often engage in what scholars call decoupling, formally adopting a policy to gain legitimacy while quietly continuing established routines. That concept proved strikingly apt for the Afghan case.

The most salient barrier the teachers described was resource inadequacy. Classrooms lacked projectors, libraries and basic technological infrastructure, forcing instructors back into traditional, content-delivery modes of teaching regardless of their enthusiasm for outcome-based principles. One participant, identified as T2, asked how a system can be implemented when there is no library, no LCD display and no working projector. The shortage was reported to be even more severe in remote provinces such as Badghis, Ghor and Farah, which the teachers described as an institutional inequity: OBE appeared to be designed, implicitly, for well-equipped universities in central provinces while being imposed everywhere.

Training emerged as a second, deeply ironic obstacle. The OBE workshops teachers attended were described as largely theoretical, lecture-based and compliance-oriented, lasting about ten days with long daily sessions running from early morning to late afternoon. Participants said the sessions raised awareness without building capacity, offering no guided practice, classroom simulations, model lessons or follow-up observation. One teacher noted that trainees were given certificates and then everything was finished, even though most did not understand what OBE actually required of them. The researchers highlight the performative contradiction here: a reform meant to promote active, student-centered learning was transmitted through passive, teacher-centered instruction, effectively socializing teachers into the very pedagogy OBE seeks to replace.

Curricular constraints compounded the problem. The national syllabus produced by the Ministry of Higher Education was perceived as misaligned with OBE principles, and the teachers who periodically revised it were seen as subject-matter experts rather than specialists in outcome-based design. Teachers reported having only about thirty percent freedom to adapt the syllabus to their departments’ needs, a ceiling the study interprets as a symbolic limit on professional autonomy. In OBE theory, curriculum content and learning experiences should be selected only after outcomes have been clearly defined, following frameworks such as Spady’s original formulation and the SMART criteria for writing specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time-bound outcomes. In practice, Afghan teachers faced the reverse: a fixed content list to which outcomes had to be retrofitted.

Policy misalignment tied these barriers together. Institutional regulations mandated the number of pages to be covered per session, and teachers who fell behind were questioned by their department heads. Assessment rules heavily favored summative examinations, reportedly accounting for the overwhelming majority of evaluation, while OBE calls for rich formative assessment aligned with intended outcomes. Examination regulations requiring a fixed number of written questions were described as incompatible with skill-based courses, since speaking and writing competencies demand performance-based and extended tasks rather than knowledge-recall papers. The result, the authors argue, is a double bind: teachers are officially encouraged to pursue outcome-oriented pedagogy while the incentive structure punishes exactly the practices it requires.

A shortage of human resources ran through all of these accounts. Only a handful of OBE master trainers served the entire country, traveling to eight or ten provinces for ten-day workshops, and some trainers sent abroad for training came from disciplines such as computer science and biology with little background in pedagogy. Many teachers in remote universities had never received any OBE training at all. The participants argued that future trainers should be selected from educators holding master’s or doctoral degrees in education, whose expertise in teaching methodology would allow them to grasp and transmit OBE principles more effectively.

From these diagnoses, the teachers built a tripartite solution framework that the authors present as the study’s central practical contribution. First, deep professionalization: expanding the pool of master trainers, selecting them from education specialists, and replacing one-off workshops with sustained, practice-based development that builds assessment literacy and curriculum-design skill. Second, dedicated resource allocation: training a curriculum team in each department to design OBE-aligned syllabi, and investing in technological infrastructure, libraries and modern equipment. Third, institutional realignment: reforming teaching and assessment policies so that they reward rather than penalize outcome-based practices, or at minimum granting teachers the professional space to follow OBE rules where existing policy conflicts with them.

Crucially, the participants insisted that these three components are interdependent. Trained teachers without resources cannot enact the reform; resources without professional competence sit unused; and professionalism plus resources without supportive policy still leaves teachers unable to implement OBE. The authors conclude that reform failure in such contexts is rarely a matter of poor technique but of incompatible systemic logics, and that the Afghan pattern, resource scarcity, prescriptive curricula, ineffective training and contradictory assessment policy reinforcing one another, offers a diagnostic lens for stalled outcome-based reforms in other under-resourced, centrally governed systems. The study’s limitations are acknowledged: a small, purposive, all-male sample from three universities, potential trainer bias among participants, and the sensitivity of the political context, all of which call for larger and more diverse follow-up research before the proposed framework is scaled up.

Subject of Research: Implementation challenges and solutions for outcome-based education among EFL teachers in Afghan public universities

Article Title: Perceived challenges and potential solutions of outcome-based education in an under-resourced context

Article References: Farooqi, M. Q., & Habibi, N. (2026). Perceived challenges and potential solutions of outcome-based education in an under-resourced context. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1110. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02202-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02202-5

Keywords: outcome-based education, Afghanistan, higher education, EFL teachers, qualitative research, thematic analysis, teacher training, curriculum alignment, assessment policy, institutional theory, educational reform, under-resourced contexts

The research team, led by Neda Naqdi Babaee and Saeedeh Shamsaee of Mazandaran University of Science and Technology together with Mohammad Ali Shams of Babol University of Medical Sciences, adopted a qualitative design centered on the perspectives of the audience itself. Rather than analyzing advertisements from a purely rhetorical distance, the researchers asked the people who actually watch these clips what makes them work. Forty Iranian English teachers were purposively selected for semi-structured interviews, a sampling strategy that ensured participants had direct professional familiarity with both language teaching and the social media ecosystem in which teacherpreneurs operate. Each participant viewed and discussed ten highly viewed Instagram clips produced by prominent entrepreneurial teachers, providing a shared reference point that grounded the conversations in concrete, comparable material.

The technical backbone of the analysis was MAXQDA, version 2022, a widely used software package for qualitative data analysis. Interview transcripts were systematically coded, allowing the researchers to identify recurring patterns across forty distinct sets of perceptions and to move from individual impressions toward robust thematic categories. This kind of computer-assisted thematic coding is increasingly standard in applied linguistics and educational research because it imposes discipline on what can otherwise be a subjective interpretive process. By tagging segments of speech and clustering them into themes, the team could trace how often particular persuasive features were mentioned, in what contexts, and with what evaluative weight, producing a structured map of audience judgment rather than a loose collection of anecdotes.

Three factors emerged with particular force. Speaker credibility, emotional appeals, and varied sentence structures were identified as the elements that most significantly influenced the success of the advertisements. Credibility, in this context, was not simply a matter of credentials displayed in a bio. Teachers in the study judged teacherpreneurs by the confidence and professionalism of their delivery, the coherence of their message, and the sense that the person on screen genuinely knew the craft of language teaching. Emotional appeals operated alongside this expertise, with successful clips tapping into learners’ anxieties, aspirations, and desire for progress. Varied sentence structures, meanwhile, kept the delivery dynamic and engaging, preventing the monotony that quickly loses viewers in a fast-paced visual medium.

Underlying these surface features, the thematic analysis identified five main themes that organize how audiences make sense of teacherpreneur advertising: audience engagement strategies, the link between marketing and education, authenticity and effective communication, teacher credibility in the eyes of the audience, and educational effectiveness. The first theme captured the tactics teacherpreneurs use to hook and hold attention, from direct address to relatable classroom scenarios. The second highlighted a tension and a synergy: the best advertisements were seen not as pure sales pitches but as hybrid artifacts in which a genuine teaching moment doubles as a demonstration of the seller’s competence. When a short clip actually teaches something useful, it simultaneously advertises the teacher’s ability to teach, collapsing the traditional boundary between content marketing and instruction.

Authenticity proved to be perhaps the most delicate ingredient. Participants repeatedly emphasized that effective communication depended on an authentic, believable presentation, and that audiences appear remarkably sensitive to performances that feel staged or exaggerated. Clarity of message delivery was repeatedly named as a key factor affecting engagement, alongside the presenter’s credibility and the believability of the overall performance. This finding resonates with broader research on parasocial trust in influencer marketing, but it carries a distinctive educational twist. A language teacher who exaggerates results or oversells a method risks not only a lost sale but damage to the professional trust on which all teaching depends. The teachers in the study appeared to reward restraint and transparency as much as charisma.

The fifth theme, educational effectiveness, connects the study to larger debates about the commercialization of language education. Teacherpreneurship, in which educators build businesses around their personal brands, has grown explosively on platforms like Instagram, particularly in contexts such as Iran where private English education is a major industry and social media offers a direct channel to prospective students. The study suggests that this commercial ecosystem is not inherently at odds with pedagogical quality. On the contrary, the perceptions gathered here indicate that audiences evaluate teacherpreneur advertisements through an educational lens, asking whether the person behind the advertisement can actually deliver the learning outcomes being promised. Marketing that demonstrates real teaching skill earns approval; marketing that substitutes hype for substance invites skepticism.

The methodological choices of the study deserve attention for what they reveal about how such questions can be investigated. Purposive sampling of forty teachers ensured that every participant was positioned to comment meaningfully on both the linguistic and commercial dimensions of the clips. Semi-structured interviews allowed the researchers to follow unexpected lines of thought while still covering a consistent set of prompts across participants, and the use of ten shared stimulus clips reduced the variability that plagues studies of social media content. The thematic coding in MAXQDA 2022 then transformed a large volume of conversational data into five coherent themes, a pipeline that other researchers studying educational influencers on TikTok, YouTube, or other platforms could readily adapt. The study was approved by the Mazandaran University of Science and Technology Ethics Committee, with informed consent obtained from all participants, and the authors report no competing interests and no external funding.

For teacherpreneurs themselves, the practical implications are direct. Credibility must be built and signaled, not merely claimed. Emotional connection matters, but it works best when anchored to genuine pedagogical substance. Delivery should be varied and clear, avoiding both monotony and theatrical excess. And authenticity, that most overused of marketing buzzwords, emerges here as a measurable audience expectation: viewers judge whether the presentation is believable, and their willingness to engage follows from that judgment. For teacher educators and researchers, the study opens questions about how prospective teachers should be prepared for a professional landscape in which self-presentation and marketing literacy are increasingly part of the job. For platforms and regulators, it hints at the standards by which educational advertising is informally policed by audiences themselves.

The broader significance of the work lies in its reframing of social media advertising as a site of educational perception. The teachers who watched these Instagram clips were not passive consumers but active evaluators, applying professional criteria to commercial messages. Their collective verdict, distilled through qualitative analysis, is that persuasion in educational marketing rests on a tripod of credibility, emotion, and craft, with authenticity as the load-bearing joint between them. As language teaching continues its migration toward digital and hybrid formats, understanding how teachers and learners judge the people who sell it online will only grow in importance. This study provides an early, carefully documented map of that judgment, drawn directly from the professionals who know best what good teaching looks like, even when it arrives in a sixty-second clip between advertisements for everything else.

Subject of Research: EFL teachers' perceptions of teacherpreneurs' persuasive techniques in Instagram advertisements

Article Title: EFL teachers’ perceptions of teacherpreneurs’ persuasive techniques on Instagram

Article References: Naqdi Babaee, N., Shamsaee, S., & Shams, M. A. (2026). EFL teachers’ perceptions of teacherpreneurs’ persuasive techniques on Instagram. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00899-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00899-x

Keywords: teacherpreneurs, TEFL, Instagram, persuasive techniques, marketing, EFL teachers, credibility, emotional appeals, authenticity, social media advertising, qualitative research, thematic analysis