It’s small start but it makes a change from the student quarantine cargo-cult
When students and researchers from China can come back is one question, another is whether the PRC will want them to – which means Australia needs all the education-friends it can get.
Say, from Indonesia.
Monash U has long got this.
In December, it became a licensed provider in Indonesia, “the first-ever international foreign-owned university.” It plans to start teaching postgrad programmes in October and have 2000 masters, 100 PhD students and 1000 people in executive ed programmes in a decade (CMM February 11 and December 10 2020).
It’s a start in a market with 67m “college age” people, (CMM August 7 2019).
And now the university, for the Australian Indonesian Centre, has signed an MOU with Indonesia’s Research and Innovation Agency for joint research between Aus and Indon universities.
It’s a start, in 2018 Indonesia was 59th for Australian Research Council funded collaborative projects, with researchers there looking to the US and UK. But it makes a change from the current quarantine cargo cult that assumes that the pandemic will pass, the politics will calm down and China will be the research and student market that matters.