WURI Ranking Ceremonies Held in Korea
The Hanseatic League of Universities (HLU), Institute for Policy Strategy on National Competitiveness (IPSNC), United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and Taylor Institute of Franklin University Switzerland (FUS) held an inaugural online conference on 11 June 2020 to celebrate the release of the World's Universities with Real Impact (WURI) Ranking. The conference introduced the WURI ranking system and provided an outlook on the challenges and opportunities for higher education institutions.
HLU Second President and Incheon National University President CHO Dong-Sung delivered the keynote speech. He mentioned that the problems with current ranking systems include academism, uniformity, past-orientation and commercial-orientation. In light of this, the HLU was founded in 2018 to pursue a vision of orientation towards practice in program development, customer in membership, external in service and learning in action. To realize the vision, HLU launched the World's Universities with Real Impact (WURI) ranking system. WURI was created to stimulate and evaluate universities' flexible and innovative efforts to foster the workforce that meets the demand from industry and society. Thereby, WURI considers the overall social impact of universities as effective educational institutions.
WURI Ranking Director MOON Hwy-Chang explained the ranking methodology. There are three evaluation phases: (1) Evaluation: The presidents (or designates), who have been invited to submit their applications, will evaluate all applications; (2) Judgment: The representatives of the university leagues (e.g., AAC&U) and higher education-related media (e.g., newspapers, magazines), and the members of the WURI Evaluation Board will review the Evaluators’ evaluation scores; and (3) Final Check: The WURI Evaluation Board aggregates the recommendations of the Judges, checks the reliability of the contents in the submitted applications, and finalizes the entries in the “Global Top 100 WURI 2020.” WURI evaluation system adopted the Text Informational Analysis (TIA) for the qualitative aspects of analysis.
During the conference, the following delivered congratulatory remarks: HLU Founding President Henk Pijlman, UNITAR Director Rabih El-Haddad and FUS President Greg Warden.
