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SINGAPORE – Singapore Management University (SMU) is teaming up with two of the best universities in Indonesia to offer exchange programs for students and faculty, as well as promoting further exchange of educational resources from the three schools.
Under the new agreements that were signed on Thursday (October 1), SMU will also collaborate with Universitas Indonesia (UI) and the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) in research areas such as digital transformation, sustainable living and growth in Asia.
The three institutions are now in preliminary discussions and will launch joint programs within the next 12 months.
Professor Lily Kong, president of SMU, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the principals of UI and ITB. The signing was witnessed by the Indonesian Minister of Education and Culture, Nadiem Makarim.
“The new memoranda of understanding on academic cooperation with UI and ITB underscore the common interests and commitment of SMU and our two Indonesian partners to develop new generations of responsible and world-ready citizens for Singapore and Indonesia through educational collaborations.” Professor Kong said.
With the two signing of memorandums of understanding, SMU has established academic cooperation with three of Indonesia’s leading universities, the first being Universitas Gadjah Mada in 2015.
Nobody, founder of the private transport company Gojek, noted that collaboration in higher education, whether between schools and industry players, other institutions or international partners, is key for students to achieve success in today’s global economy. .
“The general principle is that for students to leave the academic program and have relevance in the workforce and relevance in the world of entrepreneurship … We must really focus on simulating as much as possible the situations that they will encounter in the real world,” said Nobody, who studied in Singapore and the United States.
“So the general strategy to increase relevance is to accelerate the cross-pollination of the higher education experience.”
The minister spoke in a dialogue with Professor Kong, where they discussed his vision and plans for higher education in Indonesia.
Nobodym said that educational institutions in his country should take learning off campus. Some universities in Indonesia have their students go through a six-month off-campus learning period, be it exchange programs, internships or external projects, she added.
Doing so would allow them to gain experience that they would not otherwise have if they spent their entire academic lives at their institutions.
“It is a much faster way of ensuring that our college students are not only taught in the academic pool, but are actually thrown into the open sea for a significant amount of time from their undergraduate experience,” he said.
More than 8,000 business, government and academic leaders, as well as students, tuned in to Thursday’s dialogue, which took place on the Zoom video conferencing platform.
In response to a question from one of the attendees about how the Covid-19 situation will affect the way people learn, Nadiem said there is a misperception that e-learning and artificial intelligence will replace physical schools and face-to-face teaching in a publication – pandemic world.
As students undertake more project-based initiatives and pursue more vocational projects, they will still need face-to-face interactions with their peers, teachers and learning partners, the minister said, adding that hybrid learning models where students attend a The combination of classroom and online lessons would probably be the future in higher education.
“But what will be permanent is the use of technology to improve the classroom experience. Make it more efficient, make it more dynamic, make it more fun and use multiple media channels to engage students, that will be permanent.”
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