President stresses linkages between local, international universities

President Dr Arif Alvi has called upon the universities and higher educational institutes to create meaningful linkages with local as well as credible international universities to benchmark their best practices, learn from their experiences, innovation and creativity. The educational institutes should carry out updating of the curricula, teaching modules and materials to remain abreast with the developments taking place in the field of education, higher learning and research, and development around the world, he stressed. The President expressed these views during his visit to Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), here on Friday. He also chaired a meeting of the LUMS Advisory Board and met the LUMS leadership. Pro-Chancellor Abdul Razak Dawood, Rector Shahid Hussain, VC Dr Arshad Ahmad, members of the Board of Trustees and senior leadership of the university attended the meeting. President Alvi urged the policymakers and regulatory bodies to strive for adopting innovation and development for timely decisions and swift implementation to help Pakistan become a progressive country. The President advised the university to continuously scan the international educational horizon to identify emerging technologies, developed around the world and link them with their curricula to create quality graduates, who are equipped with skills and capable of coping with the challenges of the modern world. The President said that innovation in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector had caused an explosion of knowledge and abundance of information, which was available to everyone with the touch of a button on smart devices, which has eliminated the need for memorisation and rote learning. He underscored that universities should enable their students to become proficient in their skills, create new knowledge, as critical and analytical thinking skills would strengthen their standing in the competitive world. The President urged the university to employ out-of-the-box solutions including combination of brick and mortar, hybrid and online teaching capabilities to increase their capacity and give admission to all those FSC passing students who are aspirant of getting higher education. The President emphasised that online and hybrid education was easier, accessible, cheaper, and conveniently scalable and provided convenient and hassle-free mode of teaching to a much larger body of student without constraint of time and space and when this mode was combined with “open access knowledge and information”, it becomes even more productive. Dr Arif Alvi asserted that the research, carried out by the developed countries, especially during COVID-19 lockdown, had proved that online and hybrid modes of education were successful without compromising the integrity of the education discipline and quality and proficiency of the graduating students. He added that many universities even in the USA were increasingly offering online courses which had reached to 50 per cent of total courses with much lesser cost. He advised the universities to impart education to students through short courses without compromising their quality, to make them available for industries, businesses and services sector, which were anxiously looking for trained and proficient human resource. He asserted that the IT sector was now recruiting employees world over not only on the basis of their degrees but more on the basis of their skills and ability to deliver the required products and services. The President regretted that due to skewed policies of the past, Pakistan lost quality human resources due to brain drain to greener pastures, which deprived the country of their intellect, knowledge and expertise, which was direly needed for progress and development of the country. He called upon the university to devise ways to benefit from their services to improve their business and educational processes. Later, the President was briefed by the LUMS leadership about its strategic priorities, future development plans, issues in Pakistan’s higher education sector, and LUMS’ contribution towards providing quality higher education in Pakistan. It was informed that LUMS possessed a national footprint and over 17,000 students from different areas of the country had graduated from the university so far. It was also informed that LUMS planned to increase the volume of online course content to 25pc, and that the university had contributed towards policy-making in the country, especially in the energy sector. It was told that the university was actively engaged in collaboration with the government and the industry to focus on the issues of socioeconomic development being faced by the country.