On May 13, 2026, the webinar: “Promoting innovation in higher education towards sustainability” was held online, as part of the webinar series: “Education for Sustainable Development in Practice: Tips for educators”. There were 120 participants in this webinar.
This series is organized by the Earth Charter Center for ESD, located at the University for Peace campus and the UNITWIN Network on ESD and Social Transformation. This specific seminar was co-organized by the Technological Institute of Monterrey and Qatar Foundation.
The aim of this series is to open a space to share and learn about how sustainability education can be put into practice and be inspired by concrete actions.
The theme of this webinar focused on the challenges and opportunities to build an education capable of responding to the accelerated advancement of artificial intelligence without renouncing critical thinking, sustainability and the human dimension of knowledge. The speakers were:
- Judith Aurora Ruíz Godoy Rivera, Dean of the School of Humanities and Education at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico.
- Francisco Marmolejo, President of Higher Education of Qatar Foundation.
For TEC de Monterrey, technology is central to its educational model, however, Ms. Ruíz Godoy Rivera stated that universities cannot limit themselves to training efficient employees lacking a critical vision of technological progress, but people capable of interpreting the human implications of technological decisions. The risk is that humans end up thinking like machines, said the Dean, for this reason, Humanities is important in the integral education that students receive at this university.
Mr. Marmolejo shared about the project he coordinates, which has created an ecosystem of eight prestigious universities offering more than 70 undergraduate and graduate programs to students from 60 countries in Qatar Foundation’s Education City, the largest campus of its kind in the world, based in Doha. Qatar. In this multiversity, students design their educational process, whose programs have in common the promotion of competencies such as communication, global and local citizenship, critical and creative thinking, computer literacy, entrepreneurship, moral values, lifelong learning and Arabic.
