The Malaysian Higher Education Ministry is working on a major plan to overhaul the country's tertiary education, officials said here Wednesday.

The new plan, which is described as Malaysia's "education revolution", would focus on seven areas, including creating a new governance system to ensure that public universities can perform competitively, said Hassan Said, head of the Ministry's Higher Learning Institutes Management Department.

The new plan will also enable more students including those from rural areas and poor families to enroll for higher education, Hassan said.

Under the new plan, the Malaysian Higher Education Ministry is expected to increase the number of local students in higher education from some 60,000 currently to 1.6 million by 2010, he said.

The ministry is expected to take measures, in line with the plan, to ensure quality teaching and learning, strengthen research and development, enhance the capability of lecturers, and internationalize the tertiary education, he was quoted as saying by Malaysia's national news agency Bernama.

Hassan noted that Malaysia hoped to increase its share of the global education market worth of about 2,500 billion US dollars.

Some local scholars and professors were optimistic about the prospect of the plan, saying that in the university of the future, the curriculum will be personalized, individualized and customized.

The age profile of students also should be changed in line with lifelong learning, they said.

The Malaysian Higher Education Ministry is consulting with universities on the draft of the plan. It hoped that the plan could be started to roll out soon.

Source: Xinhua