5 May 2022

CALOHEA Project reports its progress at the 4th General Meeting

By
AUN Writer Team

By Chanya Chinsukserm, AUN Programme Officer

The Fourth General Meeting (GM4) of the CALOHEA Project was successfully held on last 21-22 April 2021 with involvement from the Partner Country Institutions of 8 countries in Southeast Asia (SEA), namely Cambodia, Laos PDR, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam in attendance.

The CALOHEA project’s purpose is to contribute to the internationalisation of higher education institutions in SEA through developing a series of interrelated measures that are indispensable for improving recognition of higher education degrees. The project is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. The ASEAN University Network (AUN) acts as co-coordinator within the region, while the University of Groningen (RUG) is the project coordinator.

The CALOHEA project unites 31 the institutes across 8 countries within ASEAN and 5 countries within Europe. They are gathered together to analyse the focus-subject area groups 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.

The GM4 was held with the aim to be a driving mechanism of the project. It specifically focused on introducing internationalisation and the 3 Key Recognition Mechanisms that would address the issues faced by institutions in the SEA Region. Recognition Mechanism 1 is a creation and use of ‘Regional Subject-Specific Qualifications and Assessment Reference Frameworks’ to permit greater comparability of institutional degree programmes. Recognition Mechanism 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. Recognition Mechanism 3 is an implementation of Authentic Assessment of internationally comparable learning outcomes in degree programmes.

The meeting also unveiled the Quality Assurance Board and the Dissemination Board along with the AUN Secretariat working team. The quality assurance and monitoring plan together with the dissemination plan were deliberately introduced and the meeting participants were updated of their current progress. The AUN’s main roles towards this project are to bring in political and institutional support throughout ASEAN and ensure that all relevant stakeholders are reached both at consultation, dissemination and exploitation stages.

Further advancement of the CALOHEA project will be introduced in the Fifth General Meeting which will be held in November 2022. The project is planned to run from 2021-2024 with the possibility of extension due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation.