Pencils DOWN
Part of ETEC’s efforts revolve around establishing a culture of quality, continuous improvement, and innovation in the education and training system.
“ETEC’s strategic priorities and ambitions for the coming year are driven by its strategy
Technology in education is essential. It has created efficiency on a large scale. We introduced technology at all levels, from curriculum to operations, and our next international advisory board in November 2019 will discuss the so-called “technolution,” or technology evolution. It is all about how technology will take the level of education from where we are today into the future. We have around 20 chairmen, chancellors, directors, and global experts coming to discuss the role of technology and how we can move beyond standard, classic, instructional-type education to a new model, and how that will look in 2030. This advisory board will address what we need to start now to be able to lead tomorrow. The international advisory board is dedicated to UBT, and at every session we have a different topic for which UBT seeks answers. The question on technology will be dealt with in November under the framework of technolution.
UBT designed an activity-based costing module called Quswa Academics to measure its performance. How has that product influenced your work?
The word Quswa means “maximization,” and we maximize the output of the five following factors: the book, the classroom, students, teachers, and the curriculum. This process of internal standards is significantly more difficult than accreditation. Every program at UBT is reviewed every semester, and we track those five factors. We track the evaluations of students against the faculty and faculty against senior faculty. We also track the relevance of the curriculum against local needs. Projects that are related to Vision 2030, for example, are being introduced to provide greater relevance and bridge the gap between theory and the actual requirements in the job market. Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman has emphasized he wants to focus on local content and increase it, and we take that to mean local military manufacturing, local plastic manufacturing, and also not to exclude local case studies for the academic sector to use. In many universities, data like that which we have from Quswa is only compiled for accreditation purposes, not actually taken into consideration. They do not drive a strategy or create a vision. We are keen to develop that strategy. Because one cannot develop something without measuring it, we had to come up with Quswa Academics, Quswa Operations, and Quswa Manpower. Everything must be challenged, and the only qualification is data; it drives everything. We have followed market practices and intuition more than data in the past, though that has no longer been the case for UBT since 2015.
How does Vision 2030 inform your viewpoint and approach in the sector?
Vision 2030 shifts the weight from the public sector to the private, enabling the latter to become a giant by 2030, introducing many new industries including sports and entertainment for both men and women to boost the economy, and creating holdings that fund other projects where the private sector can contribute. Personally, I have never been more optimistic in my life. The solutions may not be there yet, though the decisions will be made quickly. The higher education sector needs drastic change, and we truly need the Crown Prince’s intervention, especially when it comes to educational loans. We do not need open-ended scholarship programs for the majority of high school graduates. They help the business model but have a long-term negative impact on educational quality.
Looking to the future, are there any challenges you want to highlight?
Despite the efforts and attempts made by concerned ministries and government bodies to enhance the quality of private education and training institutions, private education still faces challenges and is burdened by outdated bureaucratic procedures, overlapping regulations, and duplications in authority from and between different regulation bodies related to private education and training. We need to resolve this. ✖
KFUPM registered a total of 237 patents in 2018. Could you tell us more about your strategies in place to have this ecosystem where research leads to new ideas?
After KFUPM completed development of its research infrastructure and processes, it embarked on developing an ecosystem for innovation that helps in translating research outcomes into economic impact. To achieve this, KFUPM planned to spread the culture of academic innovation at its campus. The plans included increasing awareness about intellectual property, providing training in patenting to faculty, researchers, and students, and stimulating them to innovate through recognition/ reward system. Additionally, the university established a technology transfer system according to best practices of US universities, which included an effective invention/discovery disclosure system that linked every research activity with a patenting process. These are major factors behind positioning KFUPM among the top universities in the world in terms of number of annual issued patents. Research excellence and a focus on KSA’s strategic technological challenges and needs, quality, and commercialization of research outcomes are other important aspects of KFUPM’s research system.
What kind of research does KFUPM do?
With regard to research excellence, though KFUPM started by building its capacity locally through providing training to its faculty, it collaborated internationally on specific research programs with MIT, Stanford, Caltech, and Cambridge. We established Dhahran Techno-Valley (DTV) Science Park to bring in some of world’s most advanced industrial expertise. DTV Science Park succeeded in attracting the R&D centers of some of the world’s largest multinational corporations in energy, petroleum upstream, and industrial instrumentation, automation, and control. This was a major approach toward strategically focusing KFUPM’s research and creating a platform for collaboration with industries on topics of the utmost importance to KSA. Creating impact out of research outcomes is another area KFUPM gave special attention to in developing the innovation ecosystem. This is why the university invested in building a system and an environment for technology commercialization.
Originally focused on the extraction and processing of natural resources, you have expanded your scope across a range of programs including renewables. Could you tell us more about those?
The KFUPM research agenda includes programs for both conventional and unconventional energies. Though KFUPM established the College of Petroleum and Geosciences with the aim to position it among the top petroleum schools globally, no less attention is being given to renewables and sustainability. The university has a research excellence center for renewable energy, and there is a critical level of research activities in the renewables field. In the same direction, KFUPM signed a major agreement with King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (KACARE) to collaborate mainly in the field of renewables. Additionally, the university has an advanced center for water and environment studies. The center caters to a significant part of the country’s applied research needs and services, and Saudi Aramco is one of its major clients. As well, the university established a research center for water desalination, as KSA is one of the leading global consumers for desalination technologies. Among the technologies licensed by KFUPM is one to purify heavily contaminated water and another to detect water leaks. A large percentage of the portfolio of KFUPM research outcomes—in terms of either publications or patents—is in the fields of renewables, water, and environmental protection.
Improving the quality of undergraduate education is a continuous goal for KFUPM. Making sure that university graduates have a good number of job opportunities and fulfilling current and future recruitment needs of strategic local industries and sectors is part of the plan. KFUPM had been a research-based university for several decades. However, recently the university started planning to become a research-intensive university. This will enable us to reach a critical level of research activities that is necessary for achieving the university’s economic impact targets. ✖