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During his 23-year tenure as President of Mapúa University, Dr. Reynaldo Vea led one of the Philippines’ most respected engineering and technological institutions through an era of digital transformation. He reflects on how innovations like open educational resources, MOOCs, and AI shaped Mapúa’s evolution and how curiosity, collaboration, and purpose continue to guide his leadership today as President of iPeople Inc., which oversees Mapúa and its network of educational institutions.
I developed the worldview after a number of years because before Mapua, I had been with academia and planning all the time. But, what should bind all of these ideas together? And, I guess I was lucky to have been put in a leadership position sometime in the 90s because the 90s was a time of great disruption, of great opportunities, mainly due to the advancement of digital technologies.
So, you know, it hadn’t been long when the internet was invented, I was 60 years old. So [in the] 1960s, we had the internet, and then Tim Berners-Lee, developed the World Wide Web and he said that all the information can be put on the net. And he developed the universal resource locator, URL for all the pieces of information that anybody would want to put on the web.
So the URLs, information that was building on the idea of the father of IP, Claude Shannon, who said that all information could be coded in terms of the binary digits zero and one. So, you know, even color. So what does the color green look like in terms of binary digits 0N1.
So if all information could be coded and Tim Berners-Lee says that all information could be put on the web, what a powerful thing the world wide web is. So that was among the first things we decided to do. When I came in at the turn of the century is to curate all the open educational resources that were up there with the web, to curate it for the use of our own students and faculty of course, now, a lot of things right on the web, like LMS, the MOOCs, the, e-learning resources, e-books, they write on the web.
And lately, the most powerful thing ever is artificial intelligence, because it's artificial. Artificial intelligence actually just took all the words that are present in the internet into some algorithm, a work of real generative AI. Was there any question that you might pose or any help you with programming or making a speech and so on and so forth.
So not only does one have all the information on the internet, assuming we're there already, maybe we're not, but you can actually make use of all that information to help you with a lot of tasks. Of course itself. Yeah. But, what was already powerful, having all the information on the web became even more powerful because, you know, having, that can make use of all this information actually go through itself and give you answers to questions that you like.
So what sustained me was, I believe, the excitement, the 90s, I don't even know, is the end of the 90s for a time of great change. And we so we I saw it through, you know, opened educational resources early on and then LMS sometime maybe 2010, 2009, 2010 with moved them and all this open source.
Then we went industrial spending with the board and then, the books came in, you know, got me excited again that there are MOOCs. And we brought with them early on until we had something concrete that we could use in Coursera and LinkedIn, learning that we could integrate into our courses. So it took quite some time to be able to do that.
And of course, it's an open book, still being read, but we don't want to be left behind with that. So we're certainly engaging with, with AI and, so all these things on the digital front, of course, on the global economy. We were the first schools in East Asia, East Asia, who have delivered programs that were accredited by ABET.
And, it was exciting for us. And that led us to the word graph. And that kept a CBC for a while. So, you know, before I knew it. But years have gone by. But there was never a dull moment as far as I'm concerned. So that's what kept us doing it. And working with all the personnel, the, in the cabinet, they feel changed.
They can do it and they don't give up. So basically very gritty and very committed. So working with these people also and the culture was already there, I think, when they came in. So I did not really have to think about, you know, how you deal with culture. But you, you can fit in there and but this lot got to this point three years.