Assuring Quality and Standards of Thai Higher Education Institutions: Meeting Challenges of the Education Reform Era

Prasert Suttiprasit
Thailand

With the wind of global change, it is generally accepted that the today global society is propelled by an economy indisputably driven by knowledge, information and technology. That is why education is an essential mainstay for the society's infrastructure. Thailand's Education Act 1999, the first Thailand's Education Act that became effective since the 20th of August 1999, has opened up the reform era of Thailand's education system in which all Thai citizens, of all age groups, all social and economic statuses, the underprivileged and people with special talent, would receive an appropriate education as well as relevant skills, training and development. In order to ensure the improvement of educational quality and standards at all levels, the Education Act requires that the systems of internal as well as external quality assurance shall be comprised.

In fact, the terms quality and standards, particularly in higher education sector, have been mentioned more and more for a decade. The number of universities and other higher education institutions in Thailand, both of public and private, including the ones from Western countries, are now growing very fast. From the past, Thai higher education institutions have never established quality assurance system. The credit of each institution depends on believes of the society perceived from the image of each institution.

To install the effective internal quality assurance system, Thai higher education institutions have to develop their own quality assurance system. The quality management system of each institution has to be upgraded in order to facilitate and control the quality system approach to meet the required standards. The Ministry of University Affairs (MUA) announced the nine aspects of academic standards for each higher education institutions to identify the quality indicators and criteria.

Up to now, it was figured out that most of Thailand's public higher education institutions developed their quality assurance system based on the principles of "Input-Process-Output" model of the institutional teaching and learning system. Each institution makes use of the MUA guidelines of the nine academic standards leading to the identification and control of the quality performance indicators. However, some public higher education institutions have developed the quality assurance systems identified in their own name, e.g. Chulalongkorn University (CU-QA84), Thammasat University (TU4Es) and Sri Nakharinwirot University (SUPREME 2000). On the other hands, the international quality management system standards were adopted and applied at the institutional level in a number of Thai higher education institutions such as Saint Louis's Nursing College, Durakijbundit University and Saint John's University. The international quality management system standards were also adopted and applied at the faculty or departmental level in some higher education institutions.

Whether the institutions develop their own quality assurance system or adopt the international standards, the key point is that the institutional quality assurance system has to be "established - documented - implemented - maintained and continually improved." In order to assure the efficiency of the institutional quality assurance system, the mechanism for controlling and auditing have to be carried out. In addition, the quality of each higher education institution shall be externally assessed once for the five year-period based on the external quality assessment standards for higher education recently announced by the Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment.

In this paper, the systems and mechanism of quality assurance in Thai higher education institutions were discussed. The key points are focused on how an institutional quality assurance system accomplishes the mechanism for controlling, auditing and assessing the quality of each higher education institution. Besides, the details and case studies regarding how the quality and standards of Thai higher education institutions becoming recognized both at the national as well as the international are analyzed and discussed.

The Analysis of the Improvement of English Teaching and Learning through the Implication of the GEPT Test in Taiwan
Paul Juinn-Bing Tan
Su-Chang Chen
Taiwan (Republic of China)

The purpose of this study was to determine the quality of English teaching and learning for junior college students at National Penghu Institute of Technology (NPIT). The investigation was based on the responses of NPIT students to a self-designed questionnaire prepared by the researchers. The GEPT test is being adopted in Taiwan for the evaluation of English teaching and learning, and it is improving the quality of Technical and Vocational education in Taiwan. It is noted that the result of the GEPT test will provide a very good mechanism for evaluating the quality of English language instruction so that when the Ministry of Education wants to make a decision about the licensing of colleges, they can make a decision based on the GEPT test scores. In this paper, students' common opinions about the GEPT test are reported, and then a case study is discussed.

Students' video-tape records and journals are concrete evidences for self-reflections and evaluation. A critical and analytical paper of their skills improvement is complete for sharing in the last seminar. By the end of this course, their portfolios are completely created to tell a whole story of their learning in this course.

These pedagogical strategies are designed for students' consistent engagement in procedural learning activities. Their knowledge of contents and teaching skills are interactively learned and improved in contextual learning. Such learning is actively and collaboratively participated both individually and in group process. Their learning competencies are expected to be potential tools of life-long learning in different contexts as a professional educator in near future.