Phongthep Visits ONESQA

(29-04-2013)

The Minister of Education, Mr. Phongthep Thepkanjana, paid an official visit to the Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment (ONESQA) to monitor the work there on 23 April 2013. On this occasion, the director of ONESQA Prof. Dr. Channarong Pornrungrot and the executive members gave the Minister a warm welcome then discussed ways to evaluate the quality of Thai universities.

Prof. Dr. Channarong informed Mr. Phongthep of the current problem of educational management caused by a lack of continuous policy implementation, a lack of qualitative supervision and a lack of quantitative control. Therefore, ONESQA has designed a new tool to assess the quality of Thai universities which focuses on three aspects: basic, identity and promotional measure indicators. Moreover, all outside evaluators have been instructed to encourage universities, not to find faults with them.

Moreover, ONESQA emphasized Area-Based Assessment or ABA as a crucial tool for evaluating Thai universities. It transforms the macro assessment to the micro one. The assessment will be carried out at three main levels: higher education, basic education and vocational education, at the provincial level. Furthermore, the results will be announced within a year.

Another innovative assessment which foreign countries are interested in is the 1 for 9 method in which 1 academic institution that enjoys very good evaluation results helps nine others without using any budget so that they have better results of evaluation.

Currently, ONESQA has to assess the quality of 1,785 faculties, 803 vocational colleges, 903 non formal and informal institutions, 36,453 schools and 22,605 child centers. Recently, 6.93% of schools have been ranked as very good, 58.30% good and 34.77% uncertified while 20% of vocational colleges have been ranked very good, 63.33% good and 16.67% uncertified.

The Minister of Education then asked ONESQA to consider the following issues:

- In terms of quality assessment, ONESQA should think about the effectiveness of their work because student learning achievement is actually a good indicator of the assessment;

- Although academic institutions are sometimes categorized in the same group, they are all different. So, the goal of assessment should vary according to this factor;

- The assessment should not take a long time as it distracts teachers from teaching and taking care of students in class. It should focus on aspects that need to be completed and the timeframe should not be overlong; and

- ONESQA has hired more evaluators to monitor the result of evaluation.

After the discussion with the ONESQA, the Education Minister visited its offices and a server room. Finally, he said to all ONESQA staff that a good indicator of Thai education was the quality of learners. ONESQA should cooperate with relevant organizations to develop the quality of Thai graduates. Regarding the budget proposed by ONESQA to the Ministry of Education, the Minister asked it to put some of the budget from projects that are not currently necessary or urgent to use for ones that are more important now.