Accelerating the construction of research universities is an important task to be tackled in developing our education onto a world level as early as possible and steadily boosting the scientific and technological forces of the country.

That’s why our country set the building of research universities as a major task before the education sector and directs close attention to it.

The policy of building research universities is for major universities to turn their advanced faculties and courses with solid foundations into the first-class ones which can have world supremacy, and to increase their number through a positive campaign to overtake and learn from advanced units.

And it is also to step up the building of research universities by generalizing the experience to other universities.

At present, we are working to turn different courses into the first-rate ones and generalize the experience in the efforts to develop major universities into world research universities.

Here, it is important to set proper standards in the building of research universities and top-notch courses.

We are working to set proper standards of such universities and courses in conformity with our reality and to convert the educational structure from the teaching-oriented form to a research-oriented one and establish an advanced talent training system in line with the global trend of educational development.

The main point here is the competent and excellent scientific and educational forces. In other words, the educational structure should be changed centering  on the forces.

In our experience, it was fine to transform departments into research institutes, set up laboratories of all fields in the research institutes and perfect the structure of courses centering  on the authoritative talents who can play a key role in the relevant fields.

Scientific research can lead education when departments and labs are developed into prestigious academic groups and efforts are put into research on new basic theories and development of new technologies.

The innovation of the educational structure is of great significance in training a larger number of outstanding talents by speeding up the building of research universities and first-class courses.

Since research universities attach importance to postgraduate education, it is needed to alter its structure and train highly competent talents through the postgraduate courses.

In keeping with the innovation of the educational structure, it is also necessary to improve teaching contents and methods, turn universities into centers for cutting-edge scientific research and bases for international academic exchanges and put in efforts to perfect the educational conditions and environment including the foundations for experiments and practical training.

We are pressing on with the building of research universities based on the successes achieved at central and local universities including Kim Il Sung University, Kim Hyong Jik University of Education, Pyongyang Han Tok Su University of Light Industry and Hamhung University of Chemical Industry.

Yom Tae Son, department director of the Ministry of Education