President of Pakistan’s one of the leading universities, University of Management and Technology (UMT) has urged all the universities to innovate themselves otherwise they won’t be able to combat with the challenges of post-covid world. Corona Virus has hampered not only Pakistan but entire world’s academic setup with Cambridge exams being postponed, distant learning being started, Oxford University to remain close till the start of 2021 and much more.
Ibrahim Murad, President of UMT said that HEC and all other regulatory bodies have somehow tried to initiate online teaching but the main players of system still have their reservations on it. However, the future belongs to digital education and all other leading universities of the world including Harvard, Stanford and MIT have extensive online courses which have become one of the conventional approaches rather than any innovation. In next 20-30 years, entire world will be digitalized as Netflix, Uber, Booking.com and many other digital platforms have made most of the functions digital. This digitalization has made many of the jobs obsolete but at the same time has created many new jobs related to digitalization.
As a society and country, we have always been late in adopting to technology as per the words of Ibrahim Murad, however, UMT has adapted to the latest trends and had developed their own e-learning platform with the name of eUMT. All of the courses of UMT are being made available on that platform and with the closure of institutes, the same platform will now be used for new admissions. On a whole, there is a need to innovate and revamp quickly on the global standards otherwise we would miss the bus that would never come back.
