2 April 2012, Jeju Island, South Korea.

UTM Vice-Chancellor Prof. Zaini Ujang was one of six university leaders around the world invited to speak at the 5th QS World Class held in Jeju Island, South Korea from the 1st to 3rd April 2012 recently. The QS World Class Seminar is a high-level meeting of top university leaders where they share information on university globalization and exchange strategies for achieving world-class universities standard. It has become well regarded as an exclusive event for university heads to discuss  and share insights on current issues in higher education in different countries and regions.  This year’s QS World Class focused on globalization strategies, and university evaluation and has attracted a diverse set of more than 100 participants from 31 countries including South Korea, Africa, South Africa, Japan, Taiwan, India, China, Russian Federation and UK. However, UTM was the only university from Malaysia that participated.

Prof. Zaini delivered a 45-minute talk on “Entrepreneurial Research University: A UTM Journey” based on his latest book the “New Academia: UTM as a Global Brand”.  Apart from highlighting major achievements of UTM, the talk revealed how UTM addresses the challenges for a developing country like Malaysia in nurturing students with an entrepreneurial and global mindset through two major strategies within the New Academia pedagogy, namely Job Creation and Global Outreach Program. He began the talk by highlighting the difference between a traditional learning pedagogy and new academia, with respect to the dimensions of students, faculty members, learning materials, philosophy, venue, funding, learning modes and learning outcomes. Then he explained that the Job Creation process involves bidding by students’ companies for up to 100 projects per year offered by UTM administrative units like computing, bursary and campus infrastructure services.  The projects would be completed within 6 months, and assessed as 1 or 2 credits within a course in the undergraduate curriculum.  The Global Outreach Program targets every UTM undergraduate  student to have global exposure by facilitating groups of students to develop an “immersion project” in another country. Both strategies utilize an alternative learning paradigm of experiential learning, peer instruction, and entrepreneur-in-residence.  The New Academia pedagogy espoused by UTM posits that higher education should not be confined to knowledge discovery and human capital development but should be more effectively integrated into socio-economic development towards value creation and wealth generation.

The other keynote speakers from NUS, NTU, City University of Hong Kong, Hanyang, Bristol and University of Kwa-Zulu-Natal also discussed their respective globalization strategies in light of developments in higher education in their respective regions.   A forum of panel speakers from Korea, Singapore and UK debated the pros and cons of university ranking which enlightened the participants on the multiple perspectives of the daunting exercise.