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LAOS - Thumbs up for full scale legal curriculum development and Quality Assurance standards
Dean, Vice-Deans, Heads of various departments and faculty members of the FLP of the National University of Laos posted for a souvenir photo after receiving their certificates on QA workshop
Legal curriculum and Quality Assurance (QA) standards are the foundations of high quality legal education.
At present, legal education in the Lao PDR is still catching up with international and ASEAN standards. While the National University of Laos (NUoL) is already a member of the ASEAN University Network (AUN), it has yet to receive its accreditation and must continue improving its standards set by the AUN QA framework for higher education. The standard uses scoring system from 1 (poor) to 7 (excellent). Over the next 4 years, FPL aims to reach score 4 (“Adequate as Expected”). The AUN is an agreement between 30 universities in the ten ASEAN member countries which as part of its responsibilities actively promotes quality assurance in higher education institutions, raises the quality of higher education and encourages collaboration with both regional and international bodies for the benefit of the ASEAN community.
The Luxembourg Cooperation, through the project LAO/031, seeks to improve legal education and is committed to scaling up QA standards and supporting the continued development of the higher legal education programme in Laos.
How to achieve this important goal? In collaboration with the Faculty of Law and Political Science (FLP) of the National University of Laos (NUoL), LAO/031 has supported the ongoing curricula assessment and evaluation process for all of FLP’s departments. This has included trainings, seminars and workshops on curriculum development, benchmarking of ASEAN standards and QA awareness raising workshops. Most recently, the project supported a three-day workshop on the ASEAN University Network (AUN) and Quality Assurance Programme Framework in Vientiane Capital from 14 – 16 November 2018.
The workshop hired the services and expertise of Mr. Johnson Ong Chee Bin, a high level expert from the AUN and the National University of Singapore (NUS), to validate the assessments and provide trainings on curriculum development and QA standards. The three-day workshop was chaired by Dean Viengvilay Thiengchanhxay of the FLP, co-chaired by the CTA of LAO/031, and attended by the Vice-Deans, Heads and faculty members of all FLP departments.
Thanks to this eye-opening and informative three-day workshop, the various curriculum assessments were validated by an expert and the thumbs-up was given to the new training programs. It was agreed that the new curriculum and the QA will be implemented during the project life cycle.
Two significant points must be stressed: (1) the improvement of legal curriculum is a giant step towards laying the foundations for a strong legal education institution, and (2) the QA shall set the milestones for higher legal education standards in Lao PDR. Once these mechanisms are fully institutionalized within the FLP, the next goal would be to share and replicate them in other legal learning institutions in Laos, including the Faculty of Law and Administration (FLA) of Champassak University and other law universities in Laos.
Moving forward, LAO/031 will seek to build on the assessments and evaluations that effectively helped to benchmark standards and will also continue to collaborate with an international curriculum expert in targeting 5 academic programmes by the end of the project (or one per year). Regarding QA, the ultimate objective is to graduate to score 4 AUN QA standards by 2022.
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