Shonagh Maak has filed her third blog from Malaysia. Shonagh is the Internationalisation Manager at the University of Stirling. Shonagh is currently in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia attending Going Global 2o18, the leading international education conference. Seven Scottish higher education institutions are not only attending the conference but also meeting representatives from the Malaysian Government before moving onto Indonesia next week. Shonagh is going to try and blog for us daily whilst on the mission.
It is day two of the Going Global conference and another day of interesting sessions and speakers. Although the conference is taking place here in Malaysia which inevitably means that a number of the sessions are more focused on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN region), there is also a good number of delegates and speakers from around the world sharing their ideas and experiences.
This morning I attended a breakfast session with speakers from Thailand, The Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam followed by a session on the challenges of trasnational education (TNE) quality assurance. I also managed to meet with some of our Malaysian partners and I am excited by some of the ideas we discussed to better promote Stirling to Malaysian students looking to study in the UK.
The Scottish delegation which consists of colleagues from Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt, St Andrews, UWS and Stirling were fortunate enough to secure a meeting with the Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) for Malaysia before the plenary session started yesterday. This was really helpful and offered us a real insight into the current and emerging trends here in Malaysia and how we might be able to work together to meet our respective learning, teaching and research ambitions over the next few years.
The conference was then formally opened with a fantastic variety of cultural performances from local students before a range of speakers including Noorul Ainur Mohd. Nur (Secretary General from MoHE), Sarah Deverall (British Council, Malaysia) and Yinbo Yu (NUS International Student Officer) welcomed almost a thousand delegates to the conference.
It’s the last day of the conference tomorrow before me and some of the group head on to Indonesia to learn more about what opportunities might exist for further collaboration with the HE sector another part of the ASEAN region. Hopefully it will be as interesting and rewarding as the last few days here in KL!