‘Gear students to be future-ready’
Embracing technology is just one part of newage university learning, says CEO of MAHE Dubai
Today’s universities must not only embrace technology but understand changing student mindsets, in order to be “future-ready”, the CEO of Manipal Academy of Higher Education Dubai (MAHE Dubai), said.
In an interview, Ravi Panchanadan, also managing director and CEO of Manipal Global Education Services, said today’s students are assertive, self-assured, techsavvy and expect a global outlook and education, no matter where they study.
“If you don’t listen to this generation, universities will become irrelevant one day. You have to listen to your students carefully and at the same time guide them and give them leadership qualities,” Panchanadan said.
Self-assured students
“The future-ready student is very different. The students of 10 years ago are not the students in your class today. Today’s students are more relevant, tech-savvy and much surer about themselves, very self-assured. But they also have a very short attention span. You can’t put them in a classroom for one or two hours: after 15 minutes, they are going to tune off. So how do you give them what I call ‘bit-sized’ learning?”
Panchanadan pointed to brief instructional clips on YouTube, a medium popular with students, as one example of bit-sized learning. Digital platforms, which they can access anywhere — in the classroom, canteen or home — are the best means of instruction, he said.
Future-ready
Another “pillar” of being future-ready, he added, is anticipating what the upcoming job market will demand and offering relevant university ■ programmes. “We’ve started a programme called Data Sciences. We do understand that the Middle East market is still warming up to the idea of analytics and data sciences. But we’ve already instituted a course at the undergraduate level, as well as a Post Graduate Diploma in Data Sciences, a two-year programme. This is the kind of market need we’ll have, if you ask me, in two-years’ time. But we’ve already launched that course.”
Panchanadan added that the UAE also lends itself to being future-ready, because of the various futuristic initiatives being launched. “The UAE is probably the only country that has a Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence [for example]. They have that vision,” he said.
Global relevance
Lastly, Panchanadan said it was essential that students today are “globally relevant”. “It’s not adequate for a student to be just studying or learning about the UAE or India or wherever. [It’s about] how you create opportunities for the student to interact with the global system, whether it’s through student exchange programmes, bringing in faculty from outside, encouraging them to go for competitions abroad; all of that put together is how you make them globally relevant.
“It’s also about how we improve the faculty composition, from a predominantly subcontinental faculty base to a more heterogeneous, global faculty base,” he added.