Six years after its establishment, e-TQM College recently announced its relaunch as the Hamdan Bin Mohammad e-University, a fully-fledged electronic university that uses virtual as well as face-to-face learning.
Shaikh Hamdan Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, whose name the new university bears, attended the inauguration held in Dubai last week.
University Vice-Chancellor Mansour Al Awar listed the university's achievements, highlighting that it is accredited, has international academic partnerships, an e-library and other academic and learning centres.
Narimane Hadj-Hamou, Assistant Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, told Notes that the university will be offering blended learning because the management realises the benefits of face-to-face learning and is accommodating a societal view about the concept of e-learning.
Changes will be introduced as the public becomes more receptive to the university's mode of teaching.
During the opening ceremony, Mohammad Zairi, Assistant Vice-Chancellor for Strategy and Growth, discussed the liberal approach to universities that, contrary to conventional teaching methods, emphasises life-long learning and shows knowledge as a "fundamental human need, an acquired illumination, a habit, a personal possession and an inward endowment".
"Gazing into the future is a necessary evil," he said. "It is a mindset that we need to adopt for survival and preservation purposes. Our society has to have a common purpose, a determination for sustainability and continuity in who we are and what we all do collectively."
The challenges facing the university today include ways to transform class activities to explore, question, experiment and discover; how to change teachers' mindsets such that they become advocates and mentors who can guide students in learning; designing a new curriculum using new resources, Zairi added.
Narimane Hadj-Hamou said that as part of its evolution into a university, the institution has added three schools and now has a total of four: the School of Continuing Education for non-academic degrees; the School of Business and Quality Management; the School of Health and Environmental Studies; and the School of E-Education.
Hadj-Hamou said the programmes that used to be offered by e-TQM College - namely organisational excellence, public health, innovation and change management and business and quality management - are accredited by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.
Additional programmes, pending accreditation, will be added in September to coincide with the new academic year.
"Given the growth of the institute, we expect 45-50 per cent growth in the student body next year," Hadj-Hamou said. Changing the status of the college to a university will give it more credibility, she added.
This is the first step in what, she hopes, will be a successful future for the institution.
