8 December 2022

Strengthening ASEAN Universities’ IQA For the Years Ahead: Training on Internal Quality Assurance (TrainIQA) Workshop 1 in Bangkok 2022

By
Patitin Lertnaikiat
AUN Programme Officer;

In 2010, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the German Rectors' Conference (HRK) collaborated with AUN and other partners to set up a joint capacity building project called the ASEAN-QA to deliver training on external study programme evaluation (peer review) within the frame of Dialogue on Innovative Higher Education Strategies (DIES) Programme. ASEAN-QA and its partners decided to jointly organize a series of workshops within the framework of a newly developed training course referred as “TrainIQA'' in 2014. Today, TrainIQA is coordinated by the University of Potsdam and together with all of the collaborative efforts that have been provided for TrainIQA projects, AUN Secretariat and AUN-QA has also been providing continuous support for the developing activities.

With more than ten years of partnership between ASEAN-QA and AUN alongside the coordination of the University of Potsdam, all parties cooperated on the arrangement of the first face-to-face workshop ever since the pandemic occurred. Starting from November 2022 and all the way to October 2023, TrainIQA workshops will resume the offline mode of operation which serves both the online training and offline training with the first offline workshop held in Bangkok during the 28th of November to the 3rd of December 2022.

The TrainIQA Workshop 1 had 30 QA Officers or other senior higher education managers who are in charge of QA at HEIs in the ASEAN region and 30 University Leaders from their respective universities. Participants who are in charge of QA at HEIs were all guided by 10 TrainIQA Trainers through the entire TrainIQA Training Methodology. Bringing many ASEAN QA Officers and University Leaders together promoted exchange of valuable ideas as well as creating new networks or tightening existing ones among HEIs. Participants of the workshop were able to strengthen their capacities in the field of Quality Assurance by going through all the modules developed by TrainIQA along with knowledge-sharing and lesson-learning from other members in the field of QA within ASEAN universities. 

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Participants in the workshop structured, developed, and implemented an institutional change project using the Project Action Plan (PAP) approach. Throughout the 6 days of the offline workshop, the first 5 days participants trained and continuously developed their project. At the last day of the workshop, the 6th day, institutional decision makers who were University Leaders joined the event to observe. This gave workshop participants the opportunity to present their institutional change project to prominent university leaders that have the capability to make impacting changes to the landscape of HEIs.

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