The Office of Vice President for International Development and External Affairs was established in 2016 in response to the growing need to expand Gaza University (GU) international networking and cooperation. The office is in charge of coordinating international activities within the university, advancing a strategic plan for internationalization, fostering and nurturing international partnerships, as well as developing innovative programming for faculty and students to facilitate their development as global leaders committed to the improvement of their communities. GU has established academic relations with a number of European and international universities through cooperation agreements, memorandum of understanding, and membership in different programs. It is also involved in a number of programs that are sponsored by the major regional and international donors (such as the European Union, World Bank), and it competes with grants for scientific research and academic development.
Gaza University is connected and has a wide network with an adequate number of higher education and research institutions around the world to achieve its mission and strategic goals of: Excellency in education; applied and engaged research, as well as strengthening community development.
The university seeks to enhance its project management through a holistic system of information and monitoring built on the qualities of transparency and efficacy. The system will guarantee the continuity of the GU’s projects and their positive impact on the university and community.
In order to establish this system, the GU issued the Project Management Unit, according to the University Council’s decision issued on 5 December 2016, and based on the instructions of the funded-projects management. The unit falls under the supervision of the Office of the Vice President for International Development and external affairs.
The unit supervises the stages of the development and implementation of projects, starting from the submission of the project’s proposal and ending with its completion. It offers the support and guidance needed throughout the project’s phases. The unit is also responsible for supporting the implementation of the instructions and regulations issued through internal coordination.
Tasks and Responsibilities
The Management Team
Fundraising Team
The fundraising team will be responsible for the following:
The fundraising team include the following:
The Support Team
The Project Development Support Team has been established to assist the fundraising team in enhancing the GU ability to raise grants and funds, and in creating opportunities in that area for the development of new and existing projects.
The team is composed of faculty deans, heads of departments and units, faculty members and staff.
Dr. Ali A. Mansour Vice-President for International Development and External Affairs Tel: +970 8 2885731 Mob:+970 59 2288246 Email: a.mansour@gu.edu.ps
Project Title: Enhancing the Quality of Multimedia Program to Get Engaged in Game Industry
Acronym: EMPEG
Grant Number: C4-18-U-GU-06
Funded By: World Bank through the Quality Improvement Fund (QIF) through the Ministry of Education and Higher Education
Duration: (30) months, starting from 1 Oct. 2018
Our graduates and freelancers compete on few types of jobs while freelancing business is enlarging over Gaza and the region. Freelancers and graduates in Gaza focus on web development, mobile apps, and graphic design business, which are very competitor areas, while Games development is a huge sub-sector that our graduates are not ready for in the meantime due to low experience and lake of resources. Some graduates interested in the field of game development appeared in the local market, but they focus just on the programming side which is a phase in the game industry, whereas many important topics in the previous phases need interest and experience such as science, environment, characters, story..etc.
The Games development industry is ranked as one of the top valuable industries in software business worldwide. Despite that, until now we did not engage in this market. Our graduates and freelancers almost are absent from this sector of business, and current classes of games development in Gaza University need to be enhanced to meet the market demands. However, the absence of experience and information about games development market and the lack of resources and tools are the main reasons for not taking our share in this market.
Our project approach to be engaged in this sector is based on the collaboration with the international experienced firms for learning the science and methodology. Building staff capacity, developing curriculum, installing suitable equipment/tools, and training students will be provided through this project with the experience of the international experts in this field which will lead to well-qualified graduates in games development and then go to market. The long-term partnership with the private sector for training graduates and partnership with the incubators to qualify them as startups will result in good employability rate.
In addition, the partnership with the international market helps us deeply in assessing our needs in this sector and forwards our courses and programs to new trends in the labor market. Therefore, higher education will think of new programs leading to new opportunities for graduates.
Up to our knowledge, there is not an academic institute in Gaza Strip has a program related to game development, because of the absence of experienced academics in this field. All universities or colleges focus on the programming side of games in one course in their curricula and do not care about the science and methodology that is the most important to success in this field. Another advantage of the game industry is its multidisciplinary needs. Graduates from Arts, math, physics, scriptwriters, software engineers, programmers, VR, 3D, and animators will be engaged in this industry
Overall Objective
To Develop the Multimedia Program at Gaza University towards Game Development to enhance graduates employability and open a new market for them locally and internationally.
Specific Objectives:
06/07/2019
02/03/2019
07/11/2018
21/10/2018
20/10/2018
Project Title: Boosting Innovation in Curricula Development of IT Programs in Palestine
Acronym: BITPAL
Grant Number: 574131-EPP-1-2016-1-PS-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP
Funded By: The European Commission Under the Erasmus+ European Programm - Key Action 2 - Capacity Building in the Field of Higher Education
Duration: (36) months, starting from 15 Oct. 2016
Website: http://bitpal.ucas.edu.ps/
The project (BIT-PAL) aims to adopt innovative orientation in teaching that enhances the thinking of the undergraduate students.
The target of BIT-PAL is to develop the curricula of IT programs in the Palestinian academic sector for adopting new innovative teaching methodologies developed during the project. This will help IT students to become more reliable and productive and will improve their ability for learning-to-learn. Consequently, IT students will be able to start their own businesses and open several opportunities for them in an early stage before graduation and in their careers after graduation.
The specific objectives can be defined as the following:
This work package will provide effective management of the project during the preparatory phase in order to facilitate the interactions among partners and to guarantee that each WP’s activity, task and deliverable will progress smoothly toward the final goal of the project. UCAS coordinates the project and will ensure efficient management of the project.
Practically, the main objective of this work package (WP1) is to conduct an initial study and needs analysis and to define of priorities of all parties involved in the IT sector such as: IT departments in the participating universities, IT companies, Freelancers, and computer training centers.
This WP will effectively involve the professionals' representatives from these sectors to have visibility in the project development; in order to participate and follow up the project activities to contribute with recommendations and to evaluate the results.
It starts with creating a dynamic working environment that allows the building of a partnership between academics from all partners of the consortium and professionals from the local society.
In this WP a joint commission between academics, professionals, and private sector representatives will be created. The professional European expertise will be implemented in designing and preparing a questionnaire process to make a survey for the lacks of IT sector and to define the real needs. An elaborated need assessment process will be organized for representing number of target groups in Palestine. Three target groups will be considered: 1) IT companies, 2) IT students, and IT Academic staff. A workshop (WS) will be organized to lay a base for the second phase of the project.
The participation of processionals form the early beginning of the project will deepen the mutual understanding between academics, professional, and relevant private sector. Since one of the project objectives is to establish a platform for lifelong learning in the field of IT.
This WP is dedicated to staff training from local partner universities. The trained staff will form the required specialists who will carry out the development of the curricula. Furthermore, the private sector will attend these training missions in order to help the local market for opening new horizons for them. The private sector will be represented by PITA.
The combination from the academic sector and the private sector will help in enhancing the incubation process in the local market and will help in the establishment of specialized local competencies in IT.
The training program will be divided into specified different topics including:
Each topic will be organized in two levels:
During the specialized training missions in Europe, the participants will produce documents concerning: description of courses, teaching methodology, practical training, resources, text books, and references.
At the end of this WP, a workshop (WS) will be organized to evaluate the specialized training missions and local training sessions. This will help to define modalities and procedures for the development of curricula for different academic and professional levels (computer engineering, computer science, and diploma of computer programming). During the WS proceedings, the curricula development committees will be constituted.
In this WP, the three curricula committees (Computer Engineering Committee CEC, Computer Science Committee CSC, and Computer Programming Committee CPC) will evaluate the existing curricula at Palestinian partner institutions, and work on the development of new ones oriented for lifelong professions. The work will start in parallel with staff training in WP2 and with building of academic-professional partnership. The committees work will take into consideration the outputs of WS1 and WS2, and will be based on the needs evaluation done in WP1, the obtained experience form local training, and the documents produced during the specialized missions to Europe.
The committees will develop flexible curricula for each program in order to suite the educational systems in Palestinian Territories. Of course, the development process will be conducted in consultation with European partners and local IT professionals.
Each committee should deliver detailed curricula with syllabi for all specialized courses that include teaching modalities, resources, etc. The three curricula should take into account the local educational system needs and observe the international and EU standards.
At the end of this WP, a workshop will be organized to evaluate the developed curricula in academic and professional levels (Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Computer Programming), and will prepare for the pilot testing WP of this project.
In this WP, As relations between HEIs and IT private sector relation to activities in areas of education, practical training and research, the project will, in longer term, generate several benefits and contribute to: higher employability of students through improved training and employment prospects, generation of opportunity to attract additional funds for teaching & research, increasing of financial autonomy of universities through stimulating cooperative research with enterprises and generation of additional income from consulting, increased innovation and technology transfer and stronger economic development. The establishment of well-structured interface-scheme for the creation of Competence Centers in 4 Palestinian HEIs can further serve as a role model and stimulate long-life learning and training in the field of IT. The project aims to develop these centers to provide the IT student by the necessary mentorship and training during and after the graduation. These centers will be considered as the basis for local training centers required to conduct pilot tests and will facilitate the participation of target groups in the pilot training sessions.
A feedback process will be put in place to allow for the evaluation from different points of view; trainers, trainees, materials, and academic institutions
The centers will be supported by a web portal for collecting all the training material, pedagogical resources, and networking with the local IT private sector.
The objective of this WP is to initiate an effective collaboration between local partner universities to test the developed curricula. To realize that, preliminary common activities will be organized through two types of production:
In the first type of production, the trained staff in WP2 will be involved. For the second type, students will be involved through the orientation of their graduation projects to the designing and producing of pedagogical resources that are useful for teaching and training of topics related to IT.
Given the objective is to produce high quality multi-media pedagogical resources, UCAS will lead this activity as they have the required infrastructure and the technical capacity for developing these materials in very interactive ways. These resources will be invested, though the production activities will be mainly from UCAS, but they are required to transfer competence to other local partners.
To enforce the project idea of developing and sharing common competencies, the teachers and students from consortium partners will be encouraged to work on common students projects related to IT at both levels: engineering and technician. Both students and teachers will be allowed to meet through organizing visits.
At the end, a collective assessment of the results of pilot training tests will be done in a workshop. During that WS, there will be a final evaluation of students’ projects and pedagogical resources development. In additions, there will be the preparation for the final phase of the project.
There are a huge number of IT applications that are in use: private, public, industrial and agricultural. Most of these applications do not comply with the minimum requirements of safety and intellectual property rights (IPR) regulations. The adopted solutions in the developed countries are not applicable in Palestinian context, since, the individual and official economic status cannot bear such radical solutions. Moreover, the local IT sector suffers the lack of technical and scientific capabilities that are needed to provide tools for the sought solutions. Given the fact that, the needed solutions cannot be copied from the developed contexts; it have a huge economic impact on individual, professional and official levels. Therefore, there is a clear need to study other experiences and to develop local tools and solutions. In our methodological approach in this project, we consider that IT is not only software services but it should cover all related aspects as explained before.
The aim of this WP is to:
These objectives will be realized by a study of IT market, analyzing and determining common research topics, and launching two groups of the participated student for one-year long research graduation projects. PS partner universities are the partners who have the required students and resources to implement this WP. PS partner universities have the accredited graduate engineering program for this purpose and the required cooperation with EU partner.
The incubators in the partner university (UCAS and IUG incubators) will assist in a hands-on business incubation and a support package including technical, strategic, legal and logistical support to help get the business started, also and external consultants will participate in the incubation WBs to provide consultation and monitoring for the chosen projects.
The primary objective of this WP is to conduct a final, an effective and global evolution process that targets all the project outcomes. In this WP, a special commission for writing reports will be formed for this task.
The commission outcomes will be published in a collective evaluation event that would be organized for this purpose. The event will include all consortium partners and the project experts in addition to the professionals’ representatives and concerned officials. The evaluation of results will be used to lay a strategy for a sustainable partnership model between local universities and professional sector in the field of ground IT. Furthermore, it will launch the required steps for achieving the long term objectives regarding the building of the competence center in Palestine.
The project results will be documented in a final report and will be published and distributed.
For the quality control of the project activities and results, a multi aspect strategy will be used. It allows measuring and interpreting the obtained results directly. The quality control and monitoring will be carried out by all the concerned parties through internal and external analysis of results, progress, achievements, feedback, reports. The adopted strategy will include:
The dissemination task is a fundamental part of the project. It can be seen in the description, work packages and management that many of dissemination activities are built in into the project structure. Workshops, training, public presentations and website, will greatly contribute to the dissemination of the project results and outputs. Taking into account this during the project execution, the dissemination process will develop in two directions. The first is the information about project execution to attract attention and to create a positive image of the project impact in the field of ground vehicles education. The second is the dissemination of the teaching/training results obtained within the project framework in order to create special methodological solution. This way of dissemination is important and useful taking into account the intensive accumulation of experience, which will be reflected in the state-of-the-art teaching materials and methods. This will raise the awareness among the university environment at large.
For a wider dissemination, Arabic and English languages will be used in public events. WS1 will be held for the presentation and mobilization during the first month. This will secure the involvement of all concerned parties. The developed curricula and competencies will be presented in WS5 at the end of the project period in order to motivate local interest and support.
Taking into account the above-mentioned, the dissemination process will also include the following:
The exploitation plan of the project results will have three periods:
Within WP.10 the applicant (UCAS) will handle the whole project management and financial administration with the constant support of other beneficiary institutions.
IUG as the coordinator will participate in the overall project management, financial management, regular communication with all partners, and monitoring of project activities. UCAS will be responsible for reporting to Erasmus+ and accounting.
Kick-off meeting will be organized at the beginning of the project at the premises of the project applicant in order to establish project management procedures, quality assurance procedures and general sustainability and dissemination polices.
The adopted management plan is based on properly defined roles and responsibilities. For this purpose, a Steering Committee (SC) will be created in the kick-off meeting and will consist of representatives that have the required skills and experience from all partner universities. The SC will define the rules and procedures for the project management, and will be responsible to follow how the project targets and objectives are fulfilled. Also, the SC will adopt voting of all its members for any decisions to be made and possible conflicts to be resolved.
UCAS will have the chair position in the SC. In this position there will be the project manager Dr. Hani Qusa. The SC will delegate to individuals, groups of persons or sub-committees the responsibility for executing or monitoring specific tasks that correspond to one or a set of activities described in the project. For each task, a document detailing the purpose, the expected results, the method or procedures, and the necessary resources should be produced taking into account the descriptions of the activities presented in this form. Partner universities will locally launch, manage and monitor activities in their countries.
UCAS will ensure the overall management by:
To ensure communications, English, e-mail, fax and telephone will be adopted. Meetings and training visits will help also. A website will be used for monitoring and communicating with and between partners to keep the deadlines due to risk of restrictions in PS.
13/12/2018
23/12/2018
22/10/2018
04/09/2018
23/07/2018
04/07/2018
03/05/2018
02/05/2018
12/03/2018
07/03/2018
28/01/2018
13/12/2017
27/09/2017
24/05/2017
22/05/2017
17/05/2017
06/05/2017
25/04/2017
25/02/2017
Contact Info:
projects@gu.edu.ps