ASIA
Yojana Sharma
AsiaEngage, a new regional umbrella organisation to promote social and community engagement by universities in the Association of South East Asian Nations area, was launched at a conference in Malaysia last week.
ASIA
Yojana Sharma
Universities that want to engage in regional development, community outreach or even philanthropic support say they first have to overcome the ‘tyranny’ of international university rankings, which mainly value research output and give little credit for helping to transform society, including reducing poverty and inequity.
ASIA
Hana Kamaruddin
University partnerships with industry can be scaled up across national boundaries in a wider region to benefit communities, a conference on academic links with business and populations through Asia heard on Monday.
GLOBAL
Yojana Sharma
In an interlinked world, it is as important to create a ‘knowledge society’ – where the benefits of knowledge are shared for the good of society – as it is to create a knowledge economy, Rajesh Tandon, an international expert on participatory research and development, told a regional conference in Malaysia on university-community-industry engagement.
ASIA
Hana Kamaruddin
“Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to be a deputy vice-chancellor,” said Saran Kaur Gill, who fulfils just that elevated role at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, where she runs industry and community partnerships. She is also executive director of the regional university network AsiaEngage, which was launched last week.
GLOBAL
Wanda Hennig
Higher education is at a crossroads. In many countries there has been a reduction in public funding for universities. ‘Baby boomers’ are retiring at a disproportional rate compared to the number of new PhDs entering the university system. And global competition for the best and brightest will invariably escalate.
GLOBAL
Sharon Dell
The universities of the Middle East and Africa have an opportunity to use the new and changing global higher education landscape to their advantage, according to speakers at the second QS-MAPLE conference, held in Durban, South Africa, this month.
GLOBAL
Sharon Dell
New and ‘disruptive’ models of education are needed if universities around the world are to shed their traditionally slow and imitative approach to change and to respond adequately to the new realities of global higher education.
BOTSWANA
Wanda Hennig
In 1994 Botswana joined the global education reform movement, choosing to use part of its diamond revenue to transform an elitist tertiary system accessible to few into a broad-based, equitable system where the focus is on relevance in terms of both the national development agenda and international competitiveness.
