By Asmahanim Amir
Pix Abd Raai Osman

BANGI, 14 May 2015 – The National University of Malaysia (UKM) will assist the Islamic University OF Riau (UIR) of  Indonesia in raising the Indonesian university’s quality of education.

For that purpose, UKM and UIR signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), here on April 22 to enter into a strategic cooperation.

UIR Rector, Prof Dr H Detri Karya said the MoU is very important to his university to improve the quality of education in term of the academic staff and also the production of high-impact journals.

“UIR has about 800 full-time and contract lecturers.  Actually 20 percent of the amount should have the status of Dr, but we just have 56 lecturers with Dr status.

“Now, 67 of our academic staff are pursuing studies at the PhD level,” he said while speaking at the MoU signing Ceremony.

He expressed hope that this collaboration between the two universities will be able to help UIR to have more lecturers at the PhD level.

“Maybe UKM will be cooperate with the Ministry of Education, Jakarta (KP) to provide scholarships to the lecturers in order to extend the study to a higher level at UKM,” he said.

He explained, if UKM is able to enter into cooperation with KP, it will facilitate UIR to obtain scholarships from the Government of Indonesia for students to do post-graduate studies at UKM.

In addition, he also hoped that the cooperation between UKM-UIR will help UIR improve the quality of its journals to international level.

“The quality of the journals published in UIR have yet to reach international standards and the number of published journals is still small,” he said.

Meanwhile, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation), Prof Dato’ Dr Mazlin Mokhtar said he was glad that the UIR Rector encouraged his academic staff to do  further studies at UKM.

“For me, this is a great honour paid to UKM and we have to consider taking this opportunity so that together with our friends we can do high impact research,” he remarked.

He said, research topics are highly recommended in order to deal with the issues and problems that are being faced by nations, whether in Malaysia, Indonesia or South East Asia.

“The problems (research) are numerous, whether from the cultural aspect, social, politics, science and technology, disasters, climate change and so on,” he explained.

Prof Mazlin also congratulated Prof Dr Muhammad Rizal and the team from the Institute of Environment and Development (LESTARI) for doing research in Riau and organising two high-impact seminars in Sumatera as well as authouring  two books on research by the Institute of The Malay World and Civilization (ATMA), UKM.

“We encourage this cooperation in order to expand knowledge and if possible to publish more new books, videos and other media because this is an opportunity that should be done jointly by UKM and UIR.

“Through this partnership, the findings and the results will lead to modules and manuals that can be used in training sessions on professional capabilities that can generate income for both universities,” he added.