President Dr Arif Alvi has underlined the need for establishing community colleges to meet the educational and skill requirements of the country.
He said that Pakistan was facing a shortage of skilled workforce and higher educational and technical institutions needed to focus on the skill development of human resources.
He expressed these views while chairing a follow-up meeting on the National University of Modern Languages (NUML), Islamabad, at Aiwan-e-Sadr on Thursday.
Rector NUML, Major General (retd) Muhammad Jaffer, gave a presentation about the role of the university in the promotion of higher education in the country.
He informed that the university was introducing the conceptual approach to learning so as to inculcate critical and analytical thinking skills among students. He apprised that 22,000 students were currently studying in different disciplines. He also highlighted the measures taken for the development of IT infrastructure, integration of IT in language learning and translation, and the promotion of high-quality research.
The President said that the world had shifted to the online mode of education and the educational institutions needed to extensively invest in developing their IT infrastructure to promote online education. He underlined the need for increasing the quantum of online education and the number of virtual classes to reduce the cost of education, particularly for students belonging to far-flung areas of the country. The President asked the management of the university to take steps for the preservation and revival of dying languages. He also appreciated the research initiatives taken by the university as well as the steps taken to develop IT infrastructure.
