Qatar University President Dr. Hassan Rashid Al Derham
President of Qatar University (QU) Dr. Hassan Rashid Al Derham has said that strong digital infrastructure helped switch the varsity from classroom education method to online mode of teaching during the pandemic.
Dr. Al Derham was speaking in a sesseion themed ‘Alternative Infrastructures for Education’ held yesterday at the Qatar Economic Forum, Powered by Bloomberg. “We had implemented our education transformation strategy which consists of 7 policies one of them is to make our campus smart and digitalised,” said Dr. Al Derham.
He said that the QU infrastructure was strong enough to shift smoothly 100 percent online. “I was surprised to see that the faculties and students adopted this new mode of learning fast. They were very enthusiastic and encouraged for the new system,” said Dr. Al Derham.
He said that QU also developed some short courses and new evaluation techniques to enhance online mode of teaching. Dr. Al Derham said that QU benefited the experiences of the universities of the world which implemented online teaching before it.
“We are moving ahead with our digital transformation strategy which was implemented with an accelerated pace. One of the most important things which we did is speeding up the process of transformation which was supposed to take two to three years to implement. We implemented successfully it between six to nine months,” said Dr. Al Derham.
He said that QU was forced to shift to online learning mode which has some demerits but at the same time it provides a lot of opportunities especially for higher education.
“Virtual learning is more challenging for school students but for us as higher education provider it is more comfortable to deal with the situation because we are dealing with adult students not children,” said Dr. Al Derham. He said that technologies and advancement of artificial intelligence, virtual realities and other things helped the faculties, students and parents in crossing the physiological barriers regarding online mode of learning.
“We should encourage our students that quality education is must for a promising future,” said Dr. Al Derham. To achieve the quality education, he said that the focus should not be only on providing best educational infrastructure but on other aspects should be considered such as policies, pedagogy, curricula design and development and way of education. “All of these things are needed to be revised because we are moving towards new norms of education,” said Dr. Al Derham.
