JOHOR BAHRU, 24 March — Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) through its expert researcher, Prof. Dr. Adi Maimun has been appointed as a partner university in ERASMUS + Marine Coastal and Delta Sustainability for Southeast Asia (MARE) Project.

The project aims to provide support to academicians in Asian higher education institutions (HEIs) to design and implement new and improvised syllabus of courses related to the marine environment and sustainability. The issue is highlighted in the project as the marine ecosystem and sustainability has become an environmental governance challenge in the Asian partner countries.

The development of syllabus and module will enable HEIs organisations to align their course content and learning programme strategy with requirements of the current law and regulation related to the issues of marine sustainability. The chosen courses for the project will cover the topics of coastal sciences, delta science, area-based management, fisheries, seabed resources and food security, offshore, exploration and mining and marine pollution.

Other aims of the project are to strengthen the networking between HEIs to promote blended online learning for the courses.  The partners will collaborate in minimizing the skills and facility gap and provide platform for variety of interactive e-learning tools, reading, audio-visuals, case study collections and regular webinars related to the courses. This is due to the high demand of e-learning platform for future ready education.

The main concept of MARE is to encourage sustainable governance and management of coastal, delta & marine (CDM) socio-ecological systems in the Asian partner and adjacent waters through ICT-enhanced tertiary education.

To address this need, Erasmus+ has financially supported MARE projects through cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices as part of the “Capacity Building in the Field of Higher Education” project. The project which is coordinated by University of Bremen, Germany has been awarded €968,844.00 over a three-year project duration.

The HEIs partnership project is a collaboration between three European partners: Germany, Italy and Estonia and two Asian partners: Vietnam and Malaysia.

UTM researchers involved in this project are Prof. Dr. Adi Maimun as the Principal Investigator with the members of Ship and Offshore Technology Research Group, panels from School of Civil Engineering and members of Science and Mathematics Education Research Group.

The HEIs involved are from EU Program Countries which are University of Bremen (Coordinator), University of Catania and National Research Council from Italy and Estonian University of Life Sciences from Estonia.

The ASIA Partner Countries who are involved in the project are Universti Teknologi Malaysia, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, UniKL MIMET, and Universiti Teknologi Petronas from Malaysia, and Vietnam Maritime University, Can Tho University, Ho Chi Minh University of Natural Resources and Environment and Centre for Marine Life Conservation and Community Development from Vietnam.