ISLAMABAD, Aug 19: The Virtual University (VU) will be brought on a par with international universities in the field of science and technology.

Secretary Federal Information Technology Khalid Saeed said this while presiding over the first-ever meeting of the board of directors of the university here on Tuesday.

The meeting also discussed various issues including budgeting and engagement of professionals and academicians to be placed on various boards and committees of the university.

Earlier, during the meeting, the university rector, Dr Naveed Malik, briefed the board members on the progress concerning different ongoing projects of the university set up with a capital cost of Rs1,000 million. He said the purpose of setting up the university was to create an enabling environment to spread IT education in the country at an affordable cost and to generate quality human resource.

Major programmes offered by the university will include a four-year bachelor’s programme in computer science, a two-year master’s programme and short duration professional courses for re-training the existing resource as well as providing continuing education for the newly-developed resource, he added. He said the university would be based in Islamabad with campuses at provincial headquarters.

He said the university would ultimately develop into a leading educational institution in the field of information technology. The interactive environment envisaged will compete closely with the conventional classroom experience, he added.

Dr Naveed said the university had anticipated an enrolment of more than 20,000 students for its bachelor’s programme based on the output of various boards of intermediate and secondary education nationwide.

In the steady state, this would imply a total enrolment of nearly 80,000 students in the bachelor’s programme alone, he said, adding a significant fraction of these graduates would be enrolled in the master’s programme, which would lead to developing project managers and senior level analysts and designers.

He said the master’s programme would also be designed to feed high-level research in this field, there by providing the necessary input into doctorate programmes in various universities of the country.