by It was a pleasure to revisit my colleagues in Thailand virtually and explore how the pandemic might influence the work we’d done the previous year. Key Issues Influencing the Future of Internationalization of Higher Education has recently been published by the Office of the Higher Education Commission of Thailand (OHEC) through its Bureau of International Cooperation Strategy (BICS). Internationalization is the process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of postsecondary education. BICS recognized that context for internationalization was changing and wanted the help of a futurist to help understand it. So, I spent a month with BICS last summer in Bangkok on a Fulbright Fellowship doing the research.
The slide shows the issues we identified last year and suggests how their emergence has been influenced by the pandemic. The issues were organized using the Three Horizons model. I particularly liked how they lent themselves to key organizing principles:
- Horizon 1 issues were about “how are we doing?” (assessing current strategy)
- Horizon 2 issues were about “what should we do next?” (sorting priorities)
- Horizon 3 issues were about “what do we want to go?” (toward a vision)
For the talk, I focused on the degree to which the pandemic influenced the issues. I think there is a general sense that a major disruption “changes everything forever.” But in looking at several major disruptions over the last few decades (9/11, the Great Recession), it is clearly not the case that everything changes. Rather the effects are mixed. In the case of our work, noted above, some issues accelerated, some stayed the same and some slowed down. I believe this is a much more helpful way to explore the influence of the pandemic, or any major disruption than the general sense of panic prevailing today. The effects are mixed, and may or may not be “permanent.”
A video of the session is also available. – Andy Hines
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