“Why I left my established career in Sydney to help lead a new university in Kazakhstan” With Dr. Loretta O’Donnell

Abstract

Some of the challenges in moving to a higher education system in another part of the world include the need to make implicit knowledge much more explicit. We have nearly 500 faculty members from 59 countries. Quite naturally, everyone arrives in Kazakhstan with a fully formed view of how a university should function. It takes time to come to a consensus position on the most appropriate way to operate within this context. For instance, five years ago, we debated the meaning of simple terms such as “learning outcomes”, because our British, American, European, Australian and Kazakh colleagues all used the term in different ways...