Transforming Thailand Higher Education with Micro-Credentials
It is obvious that Education in Thailand is in serious trouble and we have been struggling with education reform for the past decade. How could you make a positive change in Thai education as an educator? This is the question I have been asking myself for quite some time and, still, there are no definite answers. Despite the recent effort of the government in trying to make sure universities align ourselves to address the country’s development goal of Thailand 4.0 and to meet the demands of an aging society, the way things are in Thai Higher Education has not changed much.
With the government initiative on trying to utilize Outcome-based Education (OBE) as the way to modernize a curriculum, many universities are encouraged to upgrade their curriculum from a content-based one to an outcome-based one by focusing on what students should be able to know and do. However, Thailand’s take on such an initiative has resulted in more paperwork required on identifying the “learning outcomes statement” but seen little improvement in the actual development of learners. Lacking support on Outcome-based Education (OBE) policy implementation and the necessary skills needed, most Thai universities are also pretty much on their own and operating OBE with a lot of confusion in the midst of budget uncertainty and political instability.
The critical weakness of our education system lies in the lack of ‘capacity to assess student competencies’ at all levels [1]. With a lot of doubt on the quality and effectiveness of our Teacher professional development system, most faculty members are inadequately prepared in terms of pedagogical strategies for learner’s competency development and most importantly how to design an assessment and evaluation of such competency. Without knowing what to measure and how to verify competencies, it’s very hard for an educator to design a specific learning experience to support learning.
Depending on your definition of what a competency is, competency assessment can be done on a variety of scales. I have seen many Thai universities trying to measure generic competencies at a university level such as an institute’s graduate competency or at a curriculum level in a form of program-level learning outcomes. Such efforts on competency measurement, however, are sometimes hits and misses from the expectations of employees. It also seems like most universities and businesses are living in two separate worlds. One is insisting on the importance of generic and adaptable skills, another one on job-specific skills aimed at business impacts. But, can the two worlds meet in the middle somehow?
The new light of how Digital Promise micro-credentials [2] can be recognized, we now have very strong examples of the way we can use technology to bridge this gap and, if I wanna be super ambitious, to provide a solution on how we can gradually transform higher education. By having a solid framework for micro-credentials, we can highlight the importance of on-going professional development from the perspective of learners/earners. Using the learners/earners’ success as a way to measure the impact of a micro-credential, we can make sure that we are hitting the right spot by creating a truly demand-driven education.
The fact that each micro-credential will offer an opportunity for demonstrating a very specific, job-embedded skill, also means that we are no longer worries too much about the knowledge or what kind of content a learner needs to understand but rather why it’s important and how to demonstrate the application of skills and getting formal recognition for it.
Linking back to what most universities are offering in their traditional curriculum right now, it is exciting to reinvestigate what we are currently doing and rediscover the real purpose and value of education from the perspective of people we (should) care most, the learners. If we can use the concept of Digital Promise micro-credentials to extract the juiciest bits, most practical and useful parts of our curriculum and make them available for people, I’m sure we are moving closer to a meaningful path of making higher education relevant to people’s lives for a long time to come.
At KMUTT, we have started and committed to a challenging journey of KMUTT education reform, KMUTT ER, through micro-credentials and we know all too well that we need to take a systematic approach to overcome such a complex problem. It’s not possible for universities to tackle an education reform with quick-fix projects or vague, ad-hoc initiatives. In order to build a good eco-system for micro-credentials, this year, we are working with Digital Promise to pilot 10 micro-credentials created from various parts of the university. We are also looking at how the eco-system can be designed to allow earners, issuers, and recognizers to work together along with how to integrate the micro-credential framework and its competency attribute into the mainstream curriculum.
At this very early stage of micro-credential writing, we can already see the benefits of how it helps to shift the focus of learning design away from a specific list of contents to what learners would be able to ‘do’ or ‘demonstrate’ once they understand a piece of knowledge. With support from Digital Promise and many community experts, we are hopeful that we will be able to see the fruits of our efforts and make a significant impact on Thai Education.
For more information about KMUTT Micro-Credential, visit https://www.4lifelonglearning.org/
References
[1] OECD/UNESCO (2016), Education in Thailand: An OECD-UNESCO Perspective, Reviews of National Policies for Education, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264259119-en.
[2] Grunwald Associates LLC and Digital Promise. (2015). Making Professional Learning Count: Recognizing Educators’ Skills with Micro-credentials.
