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UAE University staff
With an eye to developing a clean, alternative aviation fuel to reduce carbon emissions, researchers at the United Arab Emirates University have been focusing on the production of jet fuel from sustainable resources such as halophytes, which are salt-tolerant plants that could be cultivated on a wider scale in the region’s coastal areas.
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Michael Milligan
Artificial intelligence is now a part of our evolution in technology and teachers need to be encouraged to find ways to bring AI into the classroom and have students use it in a way that is beneficial to them in the long term.
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Sponsored Article
UAE University staff
As water scarcity reaches critical levels globally, a research team at the United Arab Emirates University seeks to revolutionise seawater desalination practices, offering a path to mitigate water scarcity while championing environmental preservation.
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A scholarship programme geared to encouraging transformative leadership is enabling African students and alumni of the American University of Beirut, such as Claudette Igiraneza, to work to ease the plight of exploited migrant domestic workers in the Lebanese capital, some of whom have faced harrowing abuse.
Three students, with the support of a university incubator, have turned a vague aspiration to save waste food and eradicate hunger in Lahore, Pakistan, into a sustainable social enterprise which has delivered more than seven million meals to poor families who earn around US$100 a month or less.
The concentration of universities in cities is contributing to depopulation and deprivation of rural areas in Norway and government should respond by legislating to decentralise higher education provision to encourage more people to stay and study and work in rural areas, according to a new government report.
The United Nations secretary general has called on the world to take urgent climate action and has praised the work of universities as “essential to our success”. He has called on all organisations to examine their contribution to achieving carbon neutrality.
The sudden switch to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic does not seem to be a temporary one, yet it has caused rising inequality and has highlighted the lack of a student voice in India’s higher education system, particularly for the most disadvantaged students.
Tertiary education works and is vital in many ways for development, but evidence shows how it could have a greater social impact through collaboration, consideration of context and clear communication, if only its contribution was not being overlooked by major funders and the public.
Internationalisation of higher education can no longer be seen to be practised only within and by higher education institutions. The translation of the global to the local will only impact the local community beyond the university community if intentional internationalisation activities are implemented through alumni.
None of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs – the internationally agreed framework for tackling poverty, inequality, disease and climate change – can be achieved without the contribution of higher education through research, teaching and community engagement, networks representing 2,000 universities have told the UN.
Latin American universities stand out for the way they have prioritised social engagement and pioneered innovative community programmes, from technology incubators for cooperatives to compulsory community service, which could provide a model for universities in other regions that are interested in transformative leadership.
The World Technology Universities Network is a collection of universities dedicated to exploring best practice in how technology can change the world for the better, addressing the most pressing global challenges and contributing to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
Refugees are an important part of international higher education. By studying transformative approaches to how refugees are integrated into education and wider society, we can ensure that they achieve their potential and that higher education institutions fulfil their humanitarian duties.
University governing boards are important, but ethical lapses set them and their universities back. Ethical behaviour can be promoted through board culture, but also through developing awareness of the specific weaknesses of particular board cultures and safeguarding against them, transforming university behaviour.
Supported by her professors, Tanyaradzwa Chinyukwi is working with other young change-makers to enable local women and girls in Zimbabwe and Zambia to break through the barriers of poverty and patriarchy to end the normalisation of abuse and exploitation and help them achieve their potential.
While more women are making their way to the highest levels of academic leadership in Europe, the numbers are still shaky and many obstacles remain in their way. How can we change this and propel women to top institutional positions?
To truly transform higher education and promote gender equality requires more than raising numbers of female students and dealing with individual cases of abuse. It needs a deeper structural approach, but an increasingly competitive global higher education sector means such approaches take a low profile.
The PRESAGE programme at Sciences Po in France aims to transform the way gender inequalities are treated within higher education through embedding a gender perspective across the humanities and social sciences. Instead of gathering researchers in a specific unit, it promotes this approach throughout every graduate school and research centre.
Studying information systems combined with leadership classes and project experience with students from multiple disciplines have enabled one young Kenyan to develop an award-winning app that could save small tea farmers billions of shillings in wasted crop.
African start-ups are often among the most innovative because of the challenges they have to overcome. One start-up aims to succeed where many university computer science courses fail, transforming the labour market by giving Africans the IT skills they need to access the jobs of the future.
A multicultural study in the Pacific Rim region has shown that there is a serious divide between technology – especially artificial intelligence – and society, and we desperately need universities to develop talent that can design technological and social systems simultaneously, moving towards a concurrent design of technosocial systems.
The digital university will need to prepare for a new stage of the knowledge economy that will unify science and higher education, but it is likely to be one with fewer jobs for many and may mean universities need to rethink their purpose.
Widening access to and participation in higher education is not enough to tackle social exclusion; psychological support for disadvantaged students struggling with the problems they face at university is just as important, the first World Access to Higher Education Day conference heard.
Higher education has for years been overlooked by aid programmes. But universities in the United Kingdom, Jordan and Lebanon are partnering in a UK aid scheme helping Syrian refugees access good quality short courses that will open a pathway into formal academic qualifications.
