Back to the classroom

Education is becoming big business in the UAE with institutions from all over the world setting up shop in Dubai’s International Academic City development. But for Dubai veteran, the University of Wollongong, training the UAE’s finest young minds is nothing new. Business Management goes back to the classroom and meets UOWD President Professor Rob Whelan.

“We surveyed widely throughout the UAE using a commercial survey company and discovered that over 90 percent of UAE graduates would contemplate and were very keen on an opportunity to do doctoral studies in the UAE”
-Rob Whelan

The University of Wollongong in Dubai may only have opened its doors in 1993, but by UAE standards, it is a veteran of the country's burgeoning academic sector. As a branch of the University of Wollongong in Australia it benefits from the patronage of an institution with a long history of academic excellence and the teaching resources required to replicate those standards anywhere. But as UOWD President Rob Whelan explains, running a university in Dubai presents its own unique challenges that no amount of experience on its home turf could have prepared the university's academics for. The science professor, who specialises in bush fire ecology and was previously Dean of Faculty Sciences at the Wollongong University in Australia, came to the post at UWOD in 2008. He says: "There's no difference here from operating in America or Australia for instance. What is interesting and unique though is the fact that Dubai is central to so many countries so it is a veritable multinational hub for higher education in the region. So we're teaching degree programmes where there might be 20 or 30 nationalities in the classroom. That's very exciting but it has its challenges because there are so many different languages spoken and different cultures potentially clashing."

Local appeal

Although UOWD's student population, like the rest of Dubai, represents a melting pot of different cultures, a significant number - around 18 percent overall - are UAE nationals.  Approximately 25 percent of post-graduate students are UAE nationals and they make up the bulk of its masters students according to Whelan.

He says the participation by UAE nationals in such programmes gives an indication of the efforts being made in the country to establish a larger skilled workforce of its own. "This is beingdriven by the individuals themselves who are seeking university level qualifications. It's also being driven by their companies and agencies who know they need to build the skills in the Emiriati workforce in business and pretty much every other sector." Another strong indication of this willingness is the fact that due to popular demand from UAE national graduates, the UOWD will this year become the first university in Dubai to offer doctoral programmes, in addition to MBA and Masters programmes in international business and quality management.  Whelan explains the origins of the idea: "Over the years we've accumulated a very significant alumni of graduates from the degree programme and so initially the demand was coming from our own graduates and they were working in government agencies. Many of them were UAE nationals in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and they were feeding back to us the fact that because they were working full time there was no option to go overseas for a doctoral qualification. But they felt that they needed some research skills in their current job. As a result of that we surveyed widely throughout the UAE using a commercial survey company and discovered that over 90 percent of UAE graduates would contemplate and were very keen on an opportunity to do doctoral studies in the UAE." 

Shifting focus

The university currently offers degree programmes in predominantly business related subjects as well as accounting and finance, computer science and engineering management. Whelan is keen however, for the university to broaden its curriculum and start to offer a more comprehensive range of subjects encompassing the humanities and social sciences: "One thing that is different for me but is common is that most universities that are offshoots or have been spawned by the overseas universities are generally focussed on business and management and finance and accounting, because that's what Dubai has been doing most of. But I'm used to a comprehensive university, which has a range of disciplines. So during my time here two of my key objectives is to first enhance the research and training programme of what we do and also to broaden the university out beyond finance and accounting  to make it more comprehensive in this region." The first steps he has taken towards this has been the introduction of telecoms and engineering courses at the university. This will be followed by the introduction of humanities and social sciences courses. Whelan says, however, that one of the obstacles that it might face when introducing these courses will be recruiting experienced teaching staff for the new courses: "The challenge here is that if you bring in a new degree programme here it's a gamble because you have to hire the staff to teach it. Attraction and retention of qualified staff is challenging in any rapidly developing region." UOWD has a strong advantage in this area in the sense that it is able to bring academic staff over from its home base in Australia. And, says Whelan, many staff have been here from the start for over 15 years on three-year visas that are continually renewed. "This is a testament to how strong the university is," he says. But despite not having faced recruitment challenges so far, Whelan says the university is keen to focus on HR issues, in particular, the continued training of its existing academic staff. With this in mind, last October it set up a centre for the training and development of its staff, the Centre for Academic Staff Professional Development, which has been tasked with setting up programmes to boost best practice in teaching and learning at UOWD. Explaining the thinking behind the centre, Whelan said: "My feeling was, when I came here, that because universities are, and ought to be, strong in teaching and learning and research, the first way to achieve that is to make sure you hire very good staff. But of course all those disciplines change rapidly and the latest theories in learning for young adults change very rapidly. What I wanted to do within the university was to take the opportunity to capture the latest in good practice in teaching and learning and good practice in research and make sure all our staff have access to what is latest in that area. So I see it in a sense as a continuing education programme, but it's an in-house one for our own staff." As well as coaching its own staff, UOWD's training and development centre will run a series of seminars by experts in staff training, to which staff from other Dubai-based academic institutions will be invited.

Retaining individuality

While UOWD hopes to remain a hub for academic excellence in the region, it will not, like many other academic institutions, be taking advantage of the facilities soon to be offered at the Dubai International Academic City project. This ambitious 25 million square foot development will be the world's first free zone, which is dedicated to higher education institutions. To date it has attracted the likes of the University of Phoenix, the University of Exeter and the Manchester Business School. However, Whelan says he is reserving judgement on how the concept of grouping rival academic institutions together on one giant campus will work in practice: "I think it's a very interesting experiment actually because what they're trying to do there is apply a business cluster model that has been used in other business sectors, to higher education. And by putting a lot of institutions together and providing shared infrastructure, that's a really interesting concept that is well worth exploring. I think it's already positioning Dubai as a local hub for higher education because it's providing a lot options but whether it's viewed as a good thing by the universities that are there, remains to be seen. Because what happens is that they have been co-located with their major competitors. That's the way competition works in the business sector, but it hasn't really been tested in higher education There's quite a small pool in the sector there. You can't increase the demand for higher education just by creating more widgets (like in business). So it will be very interesting to see how this turns out."

Economic pressures

Given the current unstable economic climate in the UAE, and correspondingly, the dwindling expatriate population, the future of Dubai International Academic City looks even more uncertain. Whelan says the downturn has not affected intake at the university so far, but that the situation remains an ongoing concern for him. "The biggest uncertainty in this region is what the impact of the global financial downturn will be on demand from students. At the moment our spring semester intake looks pretty strong, so we're holding our own which is good. But of course everybody is nervous because, in this sort of downturn, a lot of expats would leave to go home and that has happened in Dubai. But that doesn't seem to have affected the demographic we are attracting, so I'm pretty confident it's not going to have a big impact on us. That's the biggest risk factor for any university here."  

Today though, Whelan is looking forward to a year of exciting firsts at the UOWD, in particular the introduction of the country's first doctoral programmes which will open the doors to a whole new world of opportunities for UAE students.  And he says that what is most exciting about his job is that the UAE's education sector is on the cusp of so many exciting changes: "Like many Australians I didn't know a great deal about the Gulf region before I came here and what I found most exciting is the fact that it is jumped from being a nomadic culture to being on the forefront of business and commerce in just a generation and a half."

Case studies:

One of the biggest projects Rob Whelan and his team will be working on in the year ahead will be the putting together of a series of Middle East based case studies for use by students studying business courses at UOWD. A gap for such case studies currently exists, says Whelan, because those current available in the UAE are based predominantly on US businesses. He says: "We're at a stage now where we have a whole range of industry partners that are willing to be partners in this enterprise. We've got about nine or ten cases that they are willing to be involved in and we've now developed them into publishable units. We'll now be bringing out a book of those ten cases and hopefully that will be the start of bigger things to come." To date a senior member of the Richard Ivy Business School at the University of West Ontario has trained the staff in putting together business cases. The hope is to make these available to other business universities in the region for MBA students.