AUA OE plays a key role in the transformation of the communities in Armenia and Artsakh. OE provides the essential infrastructure and linkages for AUA Open Centers of Excellence and Reality Labs to provide public services throughout those communities. Thus, OE enables the individual and combined knowledge from AUA’s different disciplines to flow to the communities to solve contemporary complex problems and challenges. For OE, it is paramount that communities in the rural areas have access to knowledge and skills and are engaged in clusters that enable them to solve complex problems and ultimately create economic prosperity to stay and thrive in those communities.
OE is focusing on multiple learning areas, including language training, tourism and hospitality, green transportation and circular economies, smart agriculture and women’s entrepreneurship, as well as data science and information technologies.
OE is continuously plowing the landscape for transformation to take hold, assuming a holistic, fundamental approach to make the University more vital and present in the country’s development, to fill the vital gaps of professional knowledge and skills, and to inspire pertinent clusters within the communities to come together and create tangible changes and have a positive impact.
“The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teacher for the public school, or to be a center of polite society; it is above all to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, and adjustment which forms the secrets of civilization… And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brick mason, but a man…” W.E.B. Du Bois