Friday, June 27, 2008

ICT Education in Malaysia

While I did not set out to do a formal study of ICT education on my trip to Malaysia, Greece and Turkey, I noticed a few things on the way.

Malaysia

My visit to coincided with the 24th Malaysian Education Fair 2008. The Straights Times newspaper included a sixteen page supplement for the fair. ICT and computer science featured, after business, medicine and engineering, in prominence. Australian universities compete for students in Malaysia, with universities from the UK and the USA. The Australian institution featuring prominently is Curtin Unviersity (Engineering), which has a Sarawak Campus. RMIT University
has courses in association with Metropolitan College, for business with some ICT components (also with Curtin).

The Malaysian market is very competitive for students, and Malaysian institutions may have associations with multiple overseas universities. As an example
Sunway University College, offer a Victoria University programm, but also have a Memorandum of Agreement with Lancaster University, England, and students can also complete their course at Western Michigan University, USA.

Some Malysian institutions claim exclusive arrangements with Australian institutions, such as HELP University College and The University of Queensland for ICT.

Some of the claims made by Malysian instituions for collobroation can be somewhat tenuous. As an exmaple, the the Institute Of Leadership & Quality Management announced it "...has taken the first step to visit one of the best universities in Australia, The Australian National University ...", with one of their staff mentioning "cooperate and joint-venture". In fact this seems to be just a decision by someone at ILQAM to visit the ANU, with no endorsement or agreement from ANU.


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