The project, titled Australia-ASEAN Academics Forum: Online Education during COVID-19 and Beyond, is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia ASEAN Council of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Through a series of webinars and interviews, the forum will invite academics from the 10 ASEAN nations to discuss the practices and challenges they have faced delivering online teaching during COVID-19.
The leader of the project, Dr Vinh To from the university’s School of Education, said COVID-19 had required the majority of academics in South-East Asia to move to online education for the first time. This was challenging in the many cases where all previous experience had been in traditional face-to-face teaching. This project aims to help improve participating ASEAN academics’ online delivery of higher education.
Academics from the University of Tasmania will share outstanding examples of online teaching practice in various disciplines - education, humanities and social sciences, health, ICT, business and economics.
Academics from selected ASEAN universities will also be invited to share online teaching practices they adopted during COVID-19 and the lessons learnt from the forum.
“This project will help various disciplines at the University of Tasmania to reflect on their own practices, maintain their excellent achievements and make necessary future adjustments to maximize their educational potential,” Dr To said.
“We are also excited about the potential for collaborations in research, teaching and professional development out of this forum.
“The project aims to support the Australian Government’s international relations policy and the Australia-ASEAN Council’s people-to-people links objective, especially during COVID-19, by establishing and fostering the multilateral relationship between academics and institutions in South-East Asia and Australia for ongoing partnership and collaboration”.
The project will officially begin in June this year, with rounds of webinars taking place in June and September. The webinars will be available to 300 academics or more from Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
The project is led by the research team in the University of Tasmania’s School of Education, including Dr Vinh To, Professor Victoria Carrington, Professor Sharon Fraser and Professor Monica Cuskelly.