This week in Paris UNESCO held one of their biggest conferences on higher education, gathering more than 1,200 thought leaders from around the globe.

The World Conference of Higher Education, or WCHE for short, has been pretty impressive in many ways. Ministers of Education and their delegations as well as academics from universities with multiple different cultural backgrounds discussed how to tackle the biggest challenges of teaching and learning in a more and more global world, taking into account the social, economic and environmental changes.

I remember one of the opening sessions on The New Dynamics of Higher Education and Research, where official representatives from China, India, Columbia, Senegal, Egypt and Romania addressed the issues of higher education from their respective backgrounds. Wow, what a variety of insights and experiences we were able to gather in this one session! We clearly realised that globalisation is one of the main drivers changing higher education and, to stay relevant and competitive in a global and rapidly changing marketplace, requires continuous education and training.

Most traditional universities are not designed for these new requirements yet. Information technology plays an increasingly important role in helping universities deal with the pace of change, to offer distance learning opportunities, to help them benefit from social media and cloud computing wherever, however and whenever online curricula and learning services are required.

In one of the keynote presentations, Michael Mendenhall, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer from HP, made it pretty clear that IT is significantly changing the education equation: "The last time we saw such a radical change was when monks writing with quills in monasteries were supplanted by Guttenberg´s printing press".

There are many IT projects out there already that address the new requirements in higher education. For example, in collaboration with UNESCO, HP is working on a project to set up the first e-infrastructure in Africa and the Arab region that will support universities running innovative education projects in their home countries and connecting them with experts from around the world with the help of grid and cloud computing technologies. For more information read our case study.

The UNESCO conference has clearly helped to raise issues, highlight best practices and stimulate expert debate to find solutions for the challenges of the future . I will be excited to see the results and agreed next steps resulting from the conference that will be summarised in a communiqué and published within the next couple of weeks. Let’s stay tuned!

Jeannette Weisschuh, Director Global Citizenship, HP EMEA