By Damiano Beltrami and Nour Suleiman
AMMAN - While a Jordanian team's strong showing at a prestigious international student technology competition highlights the Kingdom's potential as a technology powerhouse, academicians and researchers say universities are still struggling to realise this potential and prepare their students for the highly competitive technology market.
Princess Sumaya University for Technology (PSUT) President Hisham Ghassib said his university, whose team won third place at the Imagine Cup 2009, takes pride in the high quality of its faculty and resources but still lacks the funding to compete as a technical university on the world stage.
“The labs are excellent compared with other universities in Jordan,” Ghassib said. “In fact, we depend only on student fees to upgrade our equipment.”
Mohammad Eshbeata, 23, one of the members of PSUT's winning team, praised the outstanding quality and dedication of the teaching staff at his university, saying that the night before the deadline of the Imagine Cup, the world's premiere student competition for technology, his supervisor, Dr Ashraf Qaddumi, stayed up until 4:00am helping him finish his project.
He and his colleagues developed a complicated technology which involves computers and mobile phones with the aim of enabling certain sectors of society to meet the needs of their daily lives.
He added that the system can locate persons seeking assistance through using a mobile phone which involves contacts, sending short messages, setting dates and using the Internet through the mobile phone in addition to any other duties that can be added no matter how complicated they may be.
However, Eshbeata pointed out that the job market often requires proficiency in programming languages that are not taught at the university.
"We learned the programming language C++ at the university, but when I went to my first interview, they asked me whether I knew Java or .Net," he said. "If the school had the funding, it should make available the latest version of Microsoft Visual Studio, C#.NET, and offer more classes on how to develop programming language for mobile phones."
In the countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, like the US and the UK, on average 70 per cent of scientific research is funded by the private sector, 17 per cent by universities, 10 per cent by the government, and 3 per cent by NGOs, but in Jordan and other Arab countries, it works the other way around. In Jordan, the private sector accounts for only 3 per cent of research funding. Research is largely supported by the government (70 per cent) and through university fees (27 per cent), according to the World Bank's annual report for 2006.
Each year, the government devotes around JD42 million, or 0.34 per cent of Jordan's GDP, to scientific research throughout the country, said Adel Tweisi, secretary general of the Higher Council for Science and Technology. In Israel, by comparison, the percentage of GDP allocated for scientific research is 4.7 per cent.
Ayman Samara, 32, a Jordanian Intel engineer who graduated in 1999 from the University of Jordan and earned a Master’s degree and a PhD in optical engineering from the University of North Carolina, suggested that private funding is crucial, but noted that a productive relationship between companies and universities in the country is only just getting started.
"In the US, companies like Intel fund closely monitored five-year postgraduate students’ projects that will eventually turn out to be profitable investments for them," he said. "But in Jordan, industry is not strong, and the few companies that could support university programmes do not see a direct benefit from it."
Monther Dweiri, who also pursued his postgraduate studies in the US and is now an assistant professor at the Jordan University of Science and Technology in Irbid, explained that international companies are not sure that in case they set up programmes with Jordanian institutions, their money will be spent in the proper channels.
“There isn’t a transparent monitoring system in place,” he said.
Tweisi said he believes that the weak relationship between scientific research and the private sector in Jordan is largely due to cultural reasons.
"In Arab countries, there is a stereotypical image of faculty members who live in ivory towers, that their research is always theoretical and done for their own career benefits," he said. "A more rooted problem is also that the Arab culture tends not to trust local and Arab expertise."
To enhance the confidence of the private sector in university research, an award-winning Jordanian scientist proposed increasing the credibility of the research.
“We should provide an appropriate environment for scientific research at the national level,” said Kamel Ajlouni, president of the National Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Genetics in Amman. “We should bring foreign scientists to assess the levels of scientific research at Jordanian universities.”
Meanwhile, despite the efforts of institutions such as PSUT to develop quality postgraduate programmes and partnership endeavours from companies such as Orange and Zain, some students decide to further their studies abroad, attracted by full funding and top-notch research facilities.
"A few people from my course are going to do Master’s degrees in the US and in the UK to get better starting salaries once they are back in Jordan," Eshbeata said, adding that one of his teammates, Tareq Allan, is already in the US getting ready to start his Master’s. "The difference between a university like MIT and ours is that here you learn other people's concepts, and there you can create concepts yourself," he added.
Eshbeata, who now works as a developer for the Isketch Designer Company and teaches programming classes at MyTekPlus, an independent programming centre, is considering setting up his own company in Jordan in a few years.
"You have to take risk; if you don’t take risks you don’t make it," he said. "We took a risk in the competition; we could have failed, but we won."
