PUTRAJAYA: The Higher Education Ministry is sending its senior officers to meet Oman Embassy representatives in Kuala Lumpur on Monday to discuss the alleged academic and administrative abuses by four local universities.
Minister Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh said among the officers who would be in the Monday's meeting were the ministry's deputy director-generals Professor Dr Noor Azizi Ismail (public higher learning institutions) and Dr Mohd Nor Azman Hassan (private higher education institutions).
He said the purpose of the meeting was to find out what actually had happened which led to the banning of the four universities.
"If we are in the wrong, we will do the necessary to rectify things. We are looking at it positively as it could be a result of miscommunication," he told reporters after presenting the Malaysia's Research Star Award to 25 local researchers who had been internationally recognised for their high impact scholar articles in various journals.
Prior to this, Idris has said Malaysia had various monitoring bodies like MyRA for research universities, SETARA and MyQUEST for colleges.
Through this stringent monitoring, he said Malaysia kept tabs on the level of quality in the higher education sector.
The four universities were reported to have been caught by surprise with the news of the prohibition, which they only had learned from the media.
The Times of Oman reported recently that the Higher Education Ministry of Oman had banned students from enrolling in the four universities over alleged academic and administrative abuses.
The four universities are Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM), SEGI University, Limkokwing University of Creative Technology and Binary University of Management & Entrepreneurship.