Day after day, the knowledge and artificial intelligence economy in business markets is expanding around the world, yet there is a gap between those markets and the distance they require from educational institutions of all kinds.
This is no different from the same markets as in the past with the specialization of financial engineering, cultural engineering, and other disciplines that have not been fortunate in the curriculum and college departments, among other disciplines developed around the world.
If we compare the requirements of today’s global labor markets, which are deeply rooted in the field of a knowledge economy and its technological tools, the most important of which are the artificial intelligence industries, and between educational institutions and their specialties, there is a large gap, or a greater absence, in keeping with the presence of knowledge economy tools, technology, and artificial intelligence, in the labor markets, and concerning them in the context of educational disciplines, there is not yet, globally, in educational institutions a serious and new direction regarding the requirements of those markets, and what they impose. Shifts in the cognitive system in general, except rarely.
The outputs of educational practice in most academic institutions in most countries of the Arab world confirm that they belong to a system that prevailed 20 years ago, i.e. its outputs do not belong to the present and are absent from keeping pace with the global landscape and its radical transformations.
Some Arab countries, such as the UAE, are working in full swing to keep up with the requirements of the labor markets by goodly furnishing the details of these requirements within their academic institutions, creating departments and colleges that belong to the present, and affirming their affiliation with them and also confirming their full readiness to go to the future to which their ambitions and efforts aspire.
In addition to the automation behavior that will create unemployment in the labor markets, the failure to keep up with educational institutions and their inability to absorb the requirements of knowledge economy markets, in their curricula and college disciplines, will double those burdens that automation will create, increase the effectiveness of unemployment more and more, and even confirm the state,i.e. a State’s failure and disability in the face of its obligations to society and its citizens.
If the absence of educational institutions continues to keep pace with the requirements of labor markets, it will create a frightening accumulation of futility in their outputs in general, and here it must be noted that accelerating the construction of knowledge dams belonging to the present is the most effective way to prevent and mitigate the consequences of automation, which is the safety valve for future generations, otherwise, civilizations may disappear from existence with their human beings, cultures, and cultural heritage.
What Arab academic institutions need today is a total shift towards the knowledge system, and the engineering of their curricula following the present and the future as well, and this will only be done by introducing new departments of modern disciplines in their colleges and universities and recruiting specialized competencies to teach students and prepare them well for the needs of the labor markets, and the transformations imposed by the knowledge system on the whole world towards its trends and tools. And to talk the rest.
Author : Prof. Manahel Thabet
Published August 6, 2021
Al Bayan Newspaper
EN 
AR