Arab Universities and Development Prospects

By: Dr. AbdelHak Azzouzi

Moroccan Professor, Writer and Thinker

As we stressed in last-week article, students should be having free and flexible movement between universities and countries. However, this development poses a fundamental question related to maintaining the quality of universities and other higher education institutions. Certainly, there is another way to address the equation of quality and quantity in higher education, which is by carrying out field studies to learn about the needs of the job market, and accordingly, to develop appropriate educational programs.

But is the university a place where students learn methods of thinking or a place to gain access to the job market afterward? It is the fundamental philosophical question that arises. Here too, universities must clearly define its vision, mission, objectives and components.

It is no doubt that the universities which will not adapt and provide information and communication technology will be abandoned. We know that the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the Fifth Communication Revolution, where the development of communication can be pided into five phases.

The first is the development of language, the second is in writing, the third happened after the invention of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century by the German scientist Gothenburg. The fourth communication revolution began in the 19th century through the discovery of electricity, electromagnetic waves, telegraphs, telephones, photography and film, and then the invention of radio and television in the first half of the twentieth century. The fifth communication revolution was made available by technology in the second half of the twentieth century through the integration of the phenomenon of information explosion and the development of means of communication and its multiple methods .

The advancement of information and communication technology has shaken education and learning approaches; it becomes difficult for a modern university professor who is unfamiliar with new communication technologies- such as iTune, Second Life, Youtube or free online courses such as MIT Open courseware, edX or khan Academy -  to cope and deal with students who are fully aware of social media.

Moreover, the predominant language on the Internet is English (57 %), followed closely by the other languages: German (6.5%), Russian, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese (4 and 5%) and finally French (3.9%). This is one of the major challenges facing  newly established universities, which forces the creation of a technological ground that enables students and teachers to access the free and available knowledge. Thus, teachers can be free of re-creating lessons and, accordingly, use their time to train students instead of dumping them with information available on the Internet.

Further more, the marketing of knowledge must be one of the objectives of the university. This culture, unfortunately, is absent in many of our universities. The trio of  "university, governance, industry", is what builds developed countries, strengthens its industries and contributes to building the present and the future.

Japan, for instance, is a small country with a limited area, but it constitutes world's second economy, and there is no single house in any part of the world, but where a machine, a computer or a phone made in Japan, exists.

Japan is a large factory based on "university, governance, industry", and wise public policies in the fields of developed industries and real investments, importing all raw materials to produce manufactured materials exported to all countries of the world.

For instance, a European country such as Switzerland. although it is not cultivating cocoa, it produces the best chocolates in the world; and despite its geographic nature and its small agricultural area, it still produces the most important milk products in the world.

Further more, a country such as India has benefited from the development of its scientific research and investing in human resources and advanced technology, to the extent that some economic analysts predict that India could occupy the world's third largest economy by 2030 due to the tremendous development at  the private sector.

No doubt that we have the same capacities, but the difference lies in the university that we want for our countries to build and adopt ... What is required of many Arab countries today is to develop all its universities and all sciences, because the progress of nations is firstly and mostly by science ... they must acquire knowledge, functioning it through teaching, learning, cultural research and development. They should work as well to function all forms of literature and artistic works, to establish a knowledge society that strives to establish a pattern of knowledge production rather than the typical mode of production.