The University Grants Commission (UGC) has taken the initiative to finalise a five-year national action plan to upgrade the country’s higher education to international standards.

A meeting was held in this regard at the UGC on Thursday under the chairmanship of Education Minister ANM Ehsanul Hoque Milon. Senior officials of the Education Ministry and UGC exchanged views on the draft national action plan in the meeting, according to UGC.

The draft of the five-year “Higher Education Transformation: National Action Plan for Achieving Sustainable Excellence (2026-2030)” has been prepared in accordance with the recommendations of the national workshop on higher education transformation held at Dhaka University recently in the presence of the Prime Minister, the government’s priorities and the UGC’s strategic plan.

The minister said that initiatives should be taken to implement aspects that are consistent with the reality of Bangladesh by reviewing successful higher education reform initiatives and experiences of different countries around the world.

He suggested using the experiences of different countries, including China, the UK, Malaysia, and Pakistan, for this purpose, urging universities to formulate a comprehensive national policy on foreign student admission, academic cooperation, and internationalisation to attract foreign students.

UGC Chairman Prof Mamun Ahmed said that five strategic priorities have been set in the action plan.

These are: increasing the employability of graduates and ensuring demand-based education, strengthening university-industry cooperation and increasing global competitiveness, digital transformation and use of artificial intelligence (AI), teacher development and enhancing professional skills, research excellence, innovation, and internationalisation, and good governance, quality assurance, and institutional reforms.

The UGC Chairman said that the goal has been set to introduce Outcome-Based Education (OBE), a Career Development Centre, an Internship and Employment Monitoring System, a Learning Management System (LMS), and a Digital Administration and Artificial Intelligence-based education system in all universities of the country by 2030.

At the same time, the goal of doubling the number of research publications and patents, expanding international research and academic partnerships, developing an integrated national higher education database and establishing Bangladesh as one of the regional centres of higher education and research has also been included in the action plan.

He further said that as part of the finalisation of the draft of the action plan, a series of opinion exchange meetings will be held with the vice-chancellors of public and private universities of the country, academicians, representatives of the industry sector, development partners and representatives of civil society.

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