| Inha University President Choe Soon-ja, third from right in the first row, poses with Education Minister Hwang Woo-yea, to her right, and Inha University in Tashkent (IUT) Rector Sherzod Shermatov, left in the front row, at the Conference on Promoting International Collaboration on Higher Education at the Korea Press Center in Seoul, Nov. 16. The local university and the Korean Educational Development Institute (KEDI) organized the conference to mark the first anniversary of IUT's founding in Uzbekistan. Those in the front row include Uzbekistan Ambassador to Korea Botirjon Asadov, second from left, KEDI President Baek Sun-geun, second from right, and Belarus Ambassador to Korea Natallia Zhylevich, right. Courtesy of Inha University |
Korean university offers courses to Central Asian country
By Chung Hyun-chae
Inha University is running a university program in Uzbekistan to cultivate IT specialists in collaboration with the Uzbek authorities.
The Korean school has offered its educational program there since October 2014 when Inha University in Tashkent (IUT) was set up under the financial support of the Uzbekistan government.
IUT was established based on an agreement between Korea and Uzbekistan for educational cooperation.
Under the accord, the Uzbekistan government fully funded the university project.
Incheon-based Inha University, which has gained a reputation for its engineering college, is in charge of operating and managing IUT.
"It is the first case of a Korean university exporting its own courses to a foreign country, which is different from launching an overseas branch," Choe Soon-ja, president of Inha University, told The Korea Times during a conference on international collaboration of higher education held at the Korea Press Center in Seoul, Nov. 16.
"I hope the IUT project contributes to promoting the export of our higher education programs," she added.
Inha University has a special relationship with Uzbekistan, as it holds an annual Uzbek-Korean forum together with the Uzbekistan government.
"Our main purpose is to bring in the best IT specialists who are aware of the high standard of Korean education and to develop professional, practical and globally competitive IT leaders in Uzbekistan," said Sherzod Shermatov, rector of IUT. "Our government has chosen Korea as a role model for implementation of information and communications technology (ICT) because it is considered the top country in the world in this field."
According to Shermatov, former Korean Deputy Interior Minister Kim Nam-seok, who is now serving as deputy chairperson of Uzbekistan's State Committee for Communications, Information and Telecommunication Technologies, helped to develop a master plan for ICT implementation in Uzbekistan.
Shermatov visited Seoul from Nov. 13 to 20 to attend the conference which was jointly organized by Inha University and the Korean Educational Development Institute to mark the first anniversary of IUT's founding.
"IUT is a notable success in which a local university accelerated efforts to improve its global competitiveness by opening new ground to export our education system to another country," said Education Minister Hwang Woo-yea in his congratulatory speech during the conference.
According to Shermatov, IUT is already considered the country's top university, having 800 applicants this year for its freshmen quota of 250.
The number of students attending IUT now totals 358.
"We require applicants to submit English scores including IELTS and TOEFL because all the courses are taught in English," Shermatov said, citing the school's high foreign professor ratio enhancing its reputation.
In order to raise educational quality, the university has invested to secure a high quality faculty from all over the world as well as operating a faculty fostering program.
"We are working together with Inha to run a faculty training course to have more high-quality local instructors," Shermatov said.
The school has 11 professors, seven of whom are from Inha University in Incheon.
Given that the school sets a goal of cultivating highly qualified IT specialists who will work at IT firms, a number of local and international companies have invested in or have worked with IUT.
They include Newmax, an Uzbek company providing GPS services, and international firms such as Microsoft and HP as well as Korea's Samsung Electronics and LG CNS.
"Our government has invested around a combined $40 million on the IUT project, almost 90 percent of which was funded by industry," Shermatov said.
The university has two departments: the Department of Information and Communication Engineering (ICE) and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE).
"We are working on opening the Department of Logistics next year," Shermatov said. "Before moving forward to opening a new area, we focus more on quality."
He stressed that the school's main point is ICT but it also has some freedom to expand into different areas.
"I hope that one day we could import Inha University's School of Medicine as well," Shermatov said.
Inha University President Choe believes that her students could benefit from the IUT project through the opportunity to develop global competence by taking advantage of various international programs at IUT.
"For example, we plan to send our students to IUT next summer to interact with Uzbekistani students and take part in a program to help high school students there enter IUT," she said.
Other than IUT, there are six international universities in Uzbekistan. They include Westminster International University in Tashkent from the United Kingdom, Turin Polytechnic University in Tashkent from Italy and the Management Development Institute of Singapore in Tashkent.
The three other universities in Tashkent are Lomonosov Moscow State University in Uzbekistan, Plekhanov Russian University of Economics and Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas.
Westminster and Turin were established through the same process as IUT while the three Russian colleges are branches and the Singaporean school is a joint venture.
"All international universities have typical purposes," Shermatov said. "As IUT is an ICT-based university, the British and Singaporean schools focus more on business administration, marketing management and tourism."