AUN News

It has been nearly a month since our last AUN-QA Programme Assessments overview, and the AUN-QA team has been continuing going strong for the month of September, 2023. For this week’s overview, we have five PAs to cover with universities from Viet Nam, The Philippines, and Thailand bringing along a wide variety of programmes for the AUN-QA team to assess. No matter the field of programme, the assessors of AUN-QA are always ready to provide top quality assessment!

Quality Assurance in ASEAN over the years has been in heavy development to match the standards at the global level. But here is an idea, instead of just chasing global standards, how about we bring it over to ASEAN? This is what the first agenda of the AUN-QA International Conference 2023 has set out to do, inviting an international cast of guest speakers across the globe to give a dialogue about “Quality Assurance in the Globalized World of Higher Education”. While a one to one copy of systems that work in certain regions may not apply in ASEAN, there are still plenty of excellent practices and eye-opening experiences that can be taken for application.

The 6th ASEAN+3 Rectors' Conference, which broke new ground for collaborative innovation, concluded triumphantly on 21 September 2023 at Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia. The primary discussion sessions of the meeting sparked new insights on sustaining innovation and accelerating growth through higher education institutions’ multi-sectoral collaborations with industry, government, communities, and more. The meeting not only marked an astounding return of the biennial platform but also showed a way to a future defined by collaborative progress.

English as the Medium of Instruction (EMI) has gained tremendous momentum in propelling the internationalisation process in multilingual settings, especially in the field of education where language barriers between different stakeholders need to be approached through a diverse and practical lens. The AUN webinar “Unlocking the power of EMI: Leveraging English as a Medium of Instruction for Academic Success” not only addressed the importance of EMI as a tool of cross-cultural communication but also explored the practicality of EMI as a potential framework applicable to various academic levels, from primary to tertiary.

Leading ASEAN universities gather to discuss avenues to better collaborate in innovation and entrepreneurship; taking advantage of the resources and opportunities currently existing in our backyard to make real economic progress, truly benefiting the region, in the 4th iteration of the AUN-University Innovation Entrepreneurship (AUN-UIE) at Singapore Management University.

The pandemic has brought many changes to higher education, and some changes are here to stay. In the 2nd Global University Associations Forum, leaders of university associations from the Arab region, China, Europe, India, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, and Southeast Asia came together to discuss what will stay after the pandemic, the sweeping digital transformation, partnership for sustainability, and more.