Are we ready for the Chinese version of technical education?

Most countries are increasingly moving away from classic graduate education to the way they can establish new markets, and create new jobs and are looking to a much more flexible, knowledge-based economy. The rise of the Internet, telecommunications, computerisation and digitisation has been helped, and has also itself helped, the parallel rise of technology and technical education as a way of creating infrastructure for a growing economy.

As this new paradigm arises, however, traditional university education starts to fall short of what digital societies and modern architectures demand. We thus see the rise of a number of new methods of education, all aimed at fulfilling specific parts of knowledge- and Internet-based education. Online education, massive open online courses, virtual universities,   university networking and cloud storage are all areas that need to be reinforced for the high-tech societies of the future.

I am not sure whether this is the main reason behind the projected Sino-Jordanian university to be established in Jiza close to Queen Alia International Airport. The government recently announced that Jordan and China will soon sign an agreement to establish a technical university in that location. China is the number one country in the world in terms of industrial workforce, from thousands of small factories to big American, European and Japanese enterprises such as Microsoft, Apple, HP, Sony and National among others.

Higher education reform in Jordan demands the broadening of university education to include technical and applied programmes. The proposed technical university is not going to be the “first” such institution in Jordan since we already have the Balqa Applied University (BAU) and Tafileh Technical University, which were supposed to be technical. But, unfortunately, both have been transformed into teaching and research universities. Some sceptics jump to a few generalisations saying that these two universities meet the needs of technical education. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see what the Sino-Jordanian technical university is going to provide.

The idea of the technical university was born to “bridge the gap between the output of the educational system in Jordan with its comprehensive concept of knowledge economy requirements and align them with the requirements of the labour market”, according to Amin Mahmoud, the former minister of higher education. 

That said, there is room for more than one technical university. In terms of what the projected university offers, I would suggest benefitting from the Chinese experience in the following fields: renewable energy, water conservation, biomedical and drug manufacturing, nanotechnology, hardware supplies and manufacturing systems.

As I said, this is not going to be the first attempt at technical education, but it is exciting to try the Chinese version which has stood the test of time and there is clearly sufficient market demand for these important industries in the daily life of
Jordanians.

The writer is dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Hashemite University. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.