February 22, 2019 at the University of Narxoz held a regular meeting of the Educational-Methodical Association of the Republican Educational-Methodical Council on groups of educational programs "Business and management". Within the program of the meeting, the rector of Manash Kozybayev NKSU Serik Maulenovich Omirbayev presented the preliminary results of the Erasmus+ TRUNAK project "Transition to University autonomy in Kazakhstan". The project has been implemented by Kazakh universities together with European partners since October 2017.
Kazakh universities during this time took part in a training seminar on the basis of the European Association of Universities (EUA), conducted analytical work on the analysis of the current state of autonomy, gave a preliminary assessment of the EUA recommendations.
At the beginning of February 2019 on the basis of Lund University (Sweden) held a master class on the development of a new model of autonomy of Kazakh universities. The rector at the meeting of the Association presented the academic community the basic ideas suggested by the members of the consortium TRUNAK for the further development of autonomy. In particular, it is proposed to consolidate the concept of "autonomy" at the legislative level, to award educational grants in the areas of training, to transfer to universities the competence to determine the threshold level of the UNT for paid education, the ratio of teaching staff and students, to assign PhD degrees, to give a "framework" character of SES, to consolidate the passage of only institutional accreditation for participation in the state educational order at all levels of education.
Serik Maulenovich noted that the project is important at this stage of development of higher education and will identify key areas in which changes will contribute to the development of autonomy in such a way as to improve the quality of teaching and research.
