According to a piece in The Star Online today, local public unis are setting stricter KPIs or key performance indicators for their staff, clearly an effort to boost their international rankings:

Playing a numbers game

BY SIMRIT KAUR

The use of KPIs in public universities promises to transform Malaysian academia.

KEY performance indicators (KPIs) at universities are not new with different terms being used to describe the measurement of an academic’s performance.

However, given the current higher education landscape, Malaysian universities are setting even more stringent KPI targets for their staff.

KPIs are now being used to not only gauge an academic’s yearly performance, but also his eligibility for promotion.

Read the rest of the article here.
If so-called positive publicity doesn't get the Gods of The Malaysian Education System cracking on that much-longed-for revamp of our education system, here's hoping the following words of wisdom from today's edition of University World News will get them moving:

"...Although Malaysia's regional hub goals are lofty, the reality may make achieving them extremely difficult. The country's higher education system has some formidable hurdles to jump before it can even consider making serious inroads into becoming a hub of any real note.

The biggest of these hurdles are the current state of the education system and Malaysia's geographical location. It is no secret the education system still is, and has been for some time, in a state of disarray.

Discrimination against certain groups of students has meant that universities were not necessarily recruiting the best and brightest who were often forced to travel overseas.

According to Professor Tan Sri Dato' Dzulkifli Abd Razak, Vice-Chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia, the education system is fragmented and is increasingly becoming "polarised and parochial".

Along with the internal disarray are questions as to the quality assurance of courses currently offered at the higher education institutions. The Malaysian Qualifications Authority or MQA works within the boundaries of the Malaysian Qualifications Framework - a government body overseeing the quality of higher education.

An ASEAN Quality Assurance Network, launched in Malaysia in 2008, and co-organised by the MQA, is being used as a means of promoting and sharing information on quality assurance in the region. Critics, however, question how much of the frameworks are merely on paper and how much is really put in to practice.

Another significant issue is the fact that Malaysia is right next door to Singapore and therefore will be competing with Singapore's 'Global Schoolhouse' concept. That programme was launched in 2002 and includes institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, INSEAD, Chicago-Booth Graduate School of Business, and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

The aim of the Global Schoolhouse is to attract 150,000 foreign students by 2015. While the initiative has not been without its own problems, including the spectacular failure of the University of New South Wales which was expected to attract a significant number of students, it does have other advantages over Malaysia.

Whether or not the Malaysian government would agree, Singapore is currently a bigger draw card for foreign students than Malaysia, particularly among Indian, Chinese and Malaysian students."
Singapore again. Ouch.

Need I say more?

An excellent summary of current attitudes towards sex and sex education in Malaysia in The Nut Graph http://thenutgraph.com/article-4757.html , found the stats from the NST survey a bit of a shocker though.

Meanwhile, The Star Online interviewed some of the country's top brains for a news feature on changing our education system, here's an excerpt:

"According to the Malaysian Institute of Economic Research executive director Datuk Dr Mohammed Ariff Abdul Kareem, human capital is a scarce commodity in the country.

“We have acute shortage of professionals because our education system is not and has not been producing skills and talents that fit into the mainstream of modern business,” he says.

Indeed, the human-capital base is nurtured from the early ages through all levels in the education system. But one of the major concerns plaguing the Malaysian education system is that it has not changed very much from one that is based on rote-learning to one that promotes critical thinking." Read the rest here.

So the education system needs to move away from rote-learning and exam myopia....hello,  has anyone out there (you know who you are) been LISTENING to what EDUCATORS have been saying for the last TWENTY YEARS? Make no mistake, I'm a big fan of economists (especially those who tell it as it is), but it's not exactly NEWS is it?

How about MAKING the changes and giving the media something to really chew on for once?

I rest my case.

An interesting, though obvious plug for foreign unis from The Times Online on "transnational education" in Malaysia:

 

Quintessentially Britain, truly Asia

Malaysia: full of Western promise

27 August 2009

By John Gill

UK institutions seeking to consolidate their position overseas are discovering Malaysia's potential. John Gill reports from Kuala Lumpur

There is a tradition at the University of Nottingham known as the "Campus 14", in which hard-drinking freshers attempt to down a pint in all 14 bars on site. In stark contrast, at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia (UNIM), the sale of alcohol - and cigarettes and condoms - is forbidden.

There are, of course, many other differences between the two: nestled as it is in the middle of a vast palm plantation, no one could confuse UNIM's campus near Kuala Lumpur with its parent in the Midlands. Yet geographical and cultural disparities aside, the degree that students earn is identical, whether they are based in the Tropics or the UK.

UNIM may be the most ambitious example of a British university's involvement in Malaysia, but the country has a diverse range of partnerships with UK institutions - links that are at the core of its aspirations to become an international "hub" for higher education.

Its strategy is founded on so-called "transnational education" - the delivery of Western degrees through partnerships with Malaysian institutions.

Read the rest of the article here.

It reads uncannily like an article I read in The Star Online a couple of days ago about Malaysia being ranked the world's 11th most preferred study destination:

"The conclusion was based on the fact that 69,154 international students from more than 150 countries have chosen Malaysia as the country they wanted to study in.

With the majority of students coming from Indonesia, China and the Middle East, the new figure was a 26.5% increase from the old count of 50,788, which was recorded on March 31 last year. The ranking was obtained from the Institute of International Education.

Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin said the rise indicated that the ministry’s target to have 80,000 international students by 2010 was achievable.

“We’re happy to have 2% of the world’s international student population,” he told reporters yesterday after announcing the National Higher Education Strategic Plan’s progress report."

According to the writer, the Ministry of Higher Education has already given the green light to the Newcastle University of Medicine for a branch campus at Iskandar Malaysia’s Educity in Nusajaya, Johor.

"It is understood that local conglomerates are negotiating with the Korean Maritime Univer-sity, Southampton University, Royal Holloway University, King’s College London, the University of Birmingham and Murdoch University to set up branch campuses in Malaysia."

Good news for students wanting to save money on living costs abroad and that international students are reportedly flocking to our shores, but perhaps the Ministry would want to carry out a study on international students in public institutions of higher versus those in private universities/colleges. I'm no psychic, but I'm willing to bet that the numbers are higher in the private colleges, namely because the degrees awarded are by foreign universities.

So where does that leave Malaysia as an international education hub? Are we fated to be  a "cheaper" destination  to those wishing to graduate with a foreign degree, functioning only as a low-cost base lining the pockets of foreign university owners? What will happen (and it will someday) when Thailand, Vietnam or Indonesia dangles more attractive incentives to foreign universities?

Where will it leave us, then? More importantly, where that does leave state-funded universities? Perhaps the fictional study I mentioned earlier should poll international students on their expectations towards public and private universities. Perhaps this will lead to a revamp of state-funded higher education, creating opportunity for public universities to regain their lost glory and finally make their mark on the world stage.

Wouldn't it after all, be a greater pride for our nation to be an international destination on the strength of its own education system, rather than relying on the 'charity' of foreign university owners?

 

I heard from a friend who teaches at UPM just the other day that the campus had to be closed for a week last month due to a minor H1N1 outbreak. I was relieved at first to hear that the campus' powers-that-be took the disease seriously, but the relief turned to horror in about 5 seconds when my friend told me that students were sent home instead of being quarantined and that lecturers were not part of the quarantine. According to my friend, this has happened at a few other universities as well: lecturers were still made to work during a H1N1 outbreak, while students were sent home or quarantined on campus.

Changing sick leave policies and allowing staff to work from home should not be just limited to corporations in the private sector, local universities and colleges need to take the cue from afflicted schools who have in the past vacated their premises of both students and teachers for the well-being of both. In local unis for instance, with well over 5000 students and a limited number of academic staff, a sloppy attitude towards disease prevention and control could well disrupt students' classes if several lecturers were to get infected. Sure, time is money, but what is a one week campus closure compared to lecturers and/or students missing several weeks of class time? Which is more damaging to the college/unis reputation?

Having said that, unis and colleges can only do so much, students and academic staff should take precautions to ward off H1n1 and not depend on the powers-that-be. Malaysians are not alone in this respect, it seems. Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post blog The  Answer Sheet tells people to Stop Sending Sick Kids To School

 

 

 

 

Forget about world rankings, Malaysian universities barely made a dent in QS.Com's first Asian-wide university rankings, published in June.  Not surprisingly, Singapore's NUS and NTU made the top 30 list (the universities have also ranked highly on QS' world university rankings last year). Thailand's Chulanglongkorn University and Mahidol University made the top 30 list too, but Malaysian unis---make that ONE Malaysian uni---only showed up on the top 40 list (Universiti Malaya at a decent #39).

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia placed #51, a notch below Universiti of Indonesia, while Universiti Sains Malaysia managed a tolerable #69. Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and Universiti Putra Malaysia were in the bottom 20 of the rankings---at #82 and #90 respectively.

 See the full rankings at: http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/asianuniversityrankings/asian_university_rankings_top_200_universities/

Interesting that the country's top research universities (UPM and USM) were unable to make even the top 50 list, which begs the question: should public unis that don't make the cut in regional (and global) rankings be penalised by the government, i.e. getting them to buck up by slashing annual budgets, trim the fat, etc?

Maybe as Gloria Steinem once said, "The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn". If all the public unis practiced this, we may have a real shot at the world rankings, say, within the next decade?