Conference brings hi-tech to higher education

April, 2013

Faculty, students and staff of Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar (WCMC-Q) joined a conference exploring innovations in the way technology is used in higher education.

The annual Technology in Higher Education (THE) Conference focuses on identifying the shifts, challenges and opportunities for educators and IT professionals, and aims to encourage innovation in the sector. The conference is jointly organized by Qatar Foundation and the nine colleges of Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU).

Stephen Kenney, Chief Administrative Officer at WCMC-Q gave the opening remarks at the conference, held at Qatar National Convention Centre on 16-17 April. Kenney recounted his experience in the early 1980s of working with one of the first personal computers to become widely available.

He said: “The machine changed the way people approached their work and it made me ask myself some serious questions. Would this machine make my job irrelevant? Was this machine sitting on my desk going to take my job away? These were things people were concerned about at the time.

“Technology is often talked about today as being ‘disruptive’, but it is important that we should not be afraid of new technologies. Instead, we must take advantage of the many great opportunities they offer us. This conference aims to encourage people in higher education to embrace change and to share their technical expertise with their colleagues and students.”

Delegates heard a keynote speech given by Philip Long, retired Chief Information Officer at Yale University. Long explained that new technologies have the potential to radically alter the way education is delivered, citing the example of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), which allow educators to reach hundreds of thousands of students via the Internet.

Day one of the event also saw a presentation given by two members of WCMC-Q’s Advanced Computing division, Associate Director Hanif Khalak and Systems Administrator Greg Smith. Entitled High Performance Computing and Academic Research, the session discussed the ways in which scientific research has driven advances in computing.

On day two, a workshop entitled Presentation Tools: Back to Basics was given by Gloria Peay, Applications Trainer in WCMC-Q’s IT Services division and Reya Saliba, Information Services Specialist in the university’s Distributed eLibrary.

Peay gave attendees advice on creating successful presentations using Microsoft PowerPoint. “The key to effective communication in a presentation is to achieve a complementary balance between images and text,” she said. The conference concluded with a plenary session in which the Chief Information Officers of HBKU colleges shared their visions for the future of technology in higher education.

THE2013 was organized by

Qatar Foundation
Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar
Texas A&M University at Qatar
Georgetown University – School of Foreign Service at Qatar
Northwestern University in Qatar
UCL Qatar
HEC Paris in Qatar
Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar
Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies
Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar