Posts tagged with qatar.

College of the North Atlantic gets competition in Qatar

Joey Coleman, April 23, 2010 at 3:57 PM

Canada's largest overseas higher education campus could face competition with the opening of Qatar's first American-style community college. The country's Supreme Education College is establishing the Community College of Qatar (CCQ) and has awarded a contract to Texas' Houston Community College (HCC) to open the campus this fall.

The country's approximately 350,000 citizens are presently served by only one college, a branch campus of Newfoundland's College of the North Atlantic (CNA).

Opened in 2002, the CNA - Qatar operates under a contract from the Qatari government and offers 2,300 students courses in four program areas. A large focus of the campus is training for students entering Qatar's oil and gas industries. 

HCC announced its five-year contract to establish and initially run CCQ on its website this week. By the end of the five-year contract, CCQ will be a fully independent Qatari run community college and will offer many of the same programs that CNA-Q presently provides.

Qatar's Minister of Education and Higher Education stated the government choose Houston Community College due to its international reputation for high standards and experience teaching programs in a similar economy. "The HCC programming is aligned with the educational needs of Qatar," His Excellency Saad Bin Ibrahim Al-Mahmoud stated in a news release.

Texas and Qatar have extensive existing bonds with the oil and gas sector being the largest single industry in both jurisdictions.  The Qatar flag carrier offers a daily non-stop flight between Houston and Doha.

In an e-mail interview, CNA president Jean Madill says she welcomes the addition of an American community college in the region. "We believe this recent announcement will assist the Qataris in fulfilling their educational needs." 

Ms. Madill says the College of the North Atlantic - Qatar is hoping it will have a role in assisting to establish the Community College of Qatar.

CNA-Q's 10-year contract, including a one-year extension, end in 2013, she says.  

The Qatari government has invested heavily in positioning the capital city of Doha as a higher education hub for the Middle East. The city is host to six American university branch programs, housed within the Qatar Foundation's "Education City," the University of Calgary School of Nursing operates a campus near the main hospital, and the Qatar Foundation is completing construction of the Middle East's largest medical research centre, the Sidra Medical and Research Centre. The Foundation also hosts the World Innovation Summit for Education.

As the internationalization of higher education continues, more countries are restricting the export of profits by North American institutions and increasingly looking to develop their own Westernized institutions. Doha, Qatar, which has the highest concentration of foreign non-MBA branch campuses of any city in the world, is a trend-setter for internationalization and the decision to begin naturalizing their higher education sector is likely to be repeated as other countries mature their own importation of Western education.

Canadian universities are looking at the newly opening markets of India and China. Both countries have recently announced changes to prevent or minimize profiteering by Western institutions. 

(Campus Editor: This post was changed to reflect the fact that Jean Madill is the president of College of the North Atlantic. A previous version had an incorrect title for her.)

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An idea from Qatar: global accreditation

Joey Coleman, November 20, 2009 at 4:44 PM

 

This week, I was attending the first World Innovation Summit in Education conference in Doha, Qatar.

 

Hosted and financed by the Qatar Foundation, an arms-length government agency, the conference is bringing together 1,000 of the world's brightest and most influential minds in all levels of education to discuss best practices, learn from others, and return to their home countries inspired to improve education.

 

The travel costs, accommodation, and meals for all delegates (including journalists) are covered by the Qatar Foundation.

 

The stated goal of the Foundation is to create a "Davos for education." Dr. Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani, chairman of WISE, told journalists from over 50 countries covering the conference there is a void that needs to be filled. Noting there are international gatherings for economic and political leaders, he said a gathering of education leaders is needed to further societies around the world.

 

WISE is unlike most higher education conferences I've attended. There are representatives from around the world at the conference. The conference does have a significant number of delegates from Western countries, but there is a strong effort to involve representatives of developing countries. I've noted a large number of delegates from Africa and South America.

 

Only one of the six WISE awards, given to education projects in three categories, is going to a project in a developed nation. This reflects the stated goal of the conference to focus on initiatives that can be implemented in some of the world's poorest nations.

 

One of the many ideas discussed during the conference was a global accreditation body for universities.

 

One of many higher education challenges facing developing nations is they have limited or no means to ensure degrees granted in their countries will be accepted outside their borders. This is a major problem in the era of globalization when people need to have the credentials to work anywhere in the world.

A global accreditation body would create a method for developing nations to communicate the value of their degrees and provide these nations a method to measure the quality of their university programs.

 

It is a good idea.

 

To put this in a Canadian context, we often say that we have the most educated taxi drivers in the world. We have people holding PhDs from the developing world who cannot get jobs in their fields because their education is not recognized in Canada.

 

Why? There are many reasons, but the lack of ability to measure the quality of foreign degrees and ensure they meet Canadian standards is a major part.

 

It's not only foreign institutions which stand to benefit from an accreditation body.

 

Some Canadian degrees are not accepted by other Canadian institutions. A well known example of this, as reported by Erin Millar, is Capilano University in British Columbia.

 

Capilano degrees are not accepted for graduation programs at many of Canada's top universities. These same degrees are recognized by some American universities and will, pending successful completion of accreditation with the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, soon be recognized by all major American universities.

 

The creation of a voluntary non-profit, low-cost, global accreditation program will solve these Canadian problems and have benefits worldwide. It's something Canadian universities should get behind.

 

For more on the WISE conference, visit their website at http://www.wise-qatar.com

 

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