By LEE U-WEN

A TOP Australian university has joined hands with a leading local private education provider to bring a range of business degree programmes to students here.

Swinburne University of Technology, which has five campuses in Melbourne, is partnering Kaplan to launch a first batch of five bachelor of business courses from August, in areas such as marketing, tourism management and professional accounting.

'These specialist areas have an important place in Singapore's future as it opens its doors to visitors even further, and as the world enters a new era of business and financial regulatory regimes post-financial crisis,' said Kaplan Asia-Pacific president Mark Coggins.

Kaplan already has a string of Australian university partners, and having Swinburne - which just celebrated its 100th anniversary last year - will bring something new to the table in Singapore's booming private education sector, Mr Coggins said.

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In town for the signing ceremony recently, he said that the key strength of Swinburne's programmes is that they offer 'specialist research-centric academic studies, unlike typical rote-learning methodologies common in private education circles'.

The courses will all be part-time to cater to working adults holding diplomas, and will enable them to graduate with a degree in 12 months.

Swinburne's lecturers will fly in from Melbourne at weekends to conduct courses.

Students here also have the choice of going to Australia if they want to.

Swinburne, which already has a Malaysian campus in Sarawak, which it opened back in 2000, also has partnerships with institutions in countries such as Vietnam and China.

The foray into Singapore is part of a bigger plan to expand its presence in Asia even further, said its vice-chancellor and president Ian Young.

In the latest edition of the Good Universities Guide - an Australian degree and university ratings guide - Swinburne was ranked the best university in the state of Victoria for teaching quality and graduate satisfaction.

The university is seeing growing interest from Singaporeans who want to study at one of its campuses in Australia, with demand having picked up in the past two years for places there, said Prof Young.

Kaplan, which has about 15,000 students enrolled in Singapore, has several other Australian partner universities such as Murdoch, Monash and the University of South Australia.

Swinburne has a total enrolment of over 26,000, about 20 per cent of whom are international students.

This article was first published in The Business Times .