Dr. Saed Al Koni, the Vice President for Administrative Affairs participated in the third PFDP National Roundtable on Higher Education in Palestine, under the title “Strategic Planning in Higher Education”. The conference took place on November 18 and 19, 2011 in the Intercontinental Hotel, Jericho. It comes as one of several roundtables which form a new initiative designed to engage potential leaders in Palestine’s higher education system in exploration and discussion of core issues and topics in higher education. The new National Roundtables on Higher Education are intended to enable academic and professional staff from Palestine’s major universities to meet with a variety of international experts in such fields as history of world higher education, project evaluation, strategic planning, distance education, community engagement, teaching and learning, and continuing education to become familiar with current international approaches, professional literature, and case studies. Towards these briefings, university teams had discussed whether or how international best practices can or should be adapted to meet the needs of the Palestinian universities and students.

The roundtable of “Strategic Planning in Higher Education” gains importance under the current volatile circumstances and new challenges which face universities in all over the world, and Palestine is not an exception. The roundtable sessions are designed to help universities to clarify goals, align them with external and internal priorities, and to establish principles and priorities for the allocation of resources. They also introduced bases for assessing institutional quality and effectiveness by establishing concrete goals and objectives for which universities could be publically accountable to their many constituencies.

The conference was attended by Dr. Sophie Howlett, Central European University; Dr. John W. Shumaker (PFDP); Dr. FahoumShalabi, Assistant Deputy Minister for Higher Education at the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education and many others.