In two recent decades, the Internet has had a great impact on education and in particular higher education teaching quality and competition. New challenges are emerging constantly, which require global solutions for geographically distributed common issues that our modern societies are facing. Due to the global nature of the current education concepts and the evolving impact of IT on educating future professionals, the teaching methodology is continuously changing for better qualities. These challenges require support with communication, interaction, integration, knowledge transfers, and shared up-to-date best practices. IT facilities such as the Internet can potentially provide integrated environments satisfying these requirements.
As the landscape of higher education has been undergoing continuous changes, quality teaching has become a demand and an issue of importance. Student numbers have considerably expanded and diversified, both socially and geographically. Today's rapid developments increasingly demand dynamic teaching methods. Modern technologies have entered the classroom, thus modifying the interactions between students and teachers.
Koya University has seized the importance of the Internet and electronic communication by implementing a mainstream online presence. After months of development in 2012, the project was introduced in the early 2012/2013 academic year which evolved all the sectors of the university, such as a library, Scientific Journal, directorates, faculties, departments, and academic staff as well as university-wide teaching quality assurance. The project implementation contributed to increasing the overall computer literacy and Internet impact in education among Academic staff at Koya University. It also contributed to Koya University global web presence. In the latest global university web raking by webometics.info Koya University has shown a significant presence. The "Webometrics Ranking of World Universities" is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain.
The Webometrics report shows that Koya University has secured a world rank of 12096 compared with zero presence in any previous global web raking before. The report reveals that Koya University is now ranked 20th university among 55 comprehensive universities in Iraq. (webometics.info, 2014)
We thereby greatly thank our staff for this remarkable achievement. We hope that our academic community will continue with a greater sense of belonging and unity to secure the rise and success of our university. Kurdistan can be the right place to invest in the most important element for changes in our time, namely education.
Webometrics Report. [online] Available at: http://www.webometrics.info/en/aw/iraq [Accessed in July 2014].
