The CALOHEA Project premiered its first onsite assembly through the Fifth General Meeting during 21 – 23 November 2022, in Bangkok, Thailand. Despite the four preceding General Meetings being fully conducted online, the fifth CALOHEA General Meeting successfully gathered 85 participants from 7 ASEAN countries, namely Cambodia, Lao PDR, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam in attendance.
The CALOHEA Project successfully premiered its first onsite assembly through the Fifth General Meeting on 21 – 23 November 2022 in Bangkok, Thailand. Despite the four preceding General Meetings being fully conducted online with due regard to the Covid-19 outbreak’s health and safety regulations, the Fifth General Meeting (GM5) was launched in person under the host of the Faculty of Education, Chulalongkorn University, and the ASEAN University Network (AUN) Secretariat as a co-host. A total of 85 participants from 7 ASEAN countries, namely Cambodia, Lao PDR, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam were in attendance.
To recap, the CALOHEA project is established to contribute to student mobility, which advances the internationalisation of Higher Education Institutions in Southeast Asia (SEA). The development of interrelated measures for standardisation is essential to achieving the recognition of higher education degrees. Standardised mechanisms make degree recognition easier as well as improve the feasibility and effectiveness of student exchange programmes. The CALOHEA project aims to achieve recognition and comparable degrees at the study programme level, which will in turn promote mobility at the national and intraregional levels among HEIs in ASEAN and inter-regional mobility between ASEAN and EU.
The project unites 31 institutions across the 8 SEA countries along with 5 European countries. They are gathered to analyse the focus subject area groups (SAG) of Civil Engineering, Medicine and Teacher Education in order to identify the problems that are most pressing and require European Union experts’ support from their point of view. (For more information, visit https://calohea.org/)
The General Meeting is regularly held to provide a forum for higher education stakeholders from the CALOHEA partners to develop a shared understanding of adopting the use of 3 key Recognition Mechanisms (RM) within the SEA higher education system.
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- RM 1 is a creation and use of ‘Regional Subject-Specific Qualifications and Assessment Reference Frameworks’ to permit greater comparability of institutional degree programmes;
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- RM 2 is a joint method to measure and make visible full student workload to achieve programme learning outcomes as an integral part of curriculum design;
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- RM 3 is an implementation of Authentic Assessment of internationally comparable learning outcomes in degree programmes.
During the CALOHEA project, the National Meetings will be organised back-to-back with the General Meeting as a means to ensure the deliverables of the project. The Meeting’s function is to disseminate the adoption of the established Recognition Mechanisms and broaden such concepts to a wider audience at the national and regional level. The National Meetings will be open to representatives of all national and international accreditation agencies, policymakers, university authorities, academic/non-academic staff of HEIs, students, employers, and representatives of professional organisations. In 2023, two national meetings will be held in each country, for a total of fourteen national meetings.
The GM5 began with the plenary session with the opening and welcome speeches from Dr. Robert Wagenaar from University of Groningen, Dr. Choltis Dhirathiti, the AUN Executive Director, and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Siridej Sujiva, Dean of the Faculty of Education, Chulalongkorn University. Subsequently, the participants were led to separate meeting rooms, where they engaged in an in-depth, intensive instruction from the experts in their respective subject area groups. From there, participants prepared the Regional Subject-Specific Qualifications and Assessment Reference Frameworks for presentation to a wider audience at the first approaching National Meetings. Furthermore, they shared the findings and the lessons learned from the end-of-semester questionnaire as a tool for installing a culture of student workload measurement. Ultimately, they presented and peer-reviewed action plans to move towards full implementation of Authentic Assessment of programme learning outcomes.
Civil Engineer SAG
Medicine SAG
Teacher Education SAG
A total number of 29 participants from Civil Engineering SAG, 14 participants from Medicine SAG and 29 participants from Teacher Education SAG were present, together with the 4 European experts
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- Dr. Emilien Azema from University of Montpellier;
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- Dr. Alfredo Soeiro from University of Porto;
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- Dr. Ugo Faraguna from University of Pisa;
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- Dr. Anna Maria Van Trigt from University of Groningen;
Alongside the 3 ASEAN experts who acted as the SAG coordinators and intensively guided the participants through each SAG
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- Professor Dato’Dr. Ahmad Farhan Mohd Sadullah – Civil Engineering
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- Dr. Muhamad Saiful Bahri Yusoff – Medicine
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- Dr. Richard Jugar – Teacher Education
The Sixth General Meeting is scheduled to be held in June 2023 to surely update the new developments of the CALOHEA project. In the meantime, the first National Meeting will be held at the beginning of 2023.
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Article by Chanya Chinsukserm, AUN Programme Officer
