The MS FSCC project brings five leading Southeast Asian higher education institutions in agriculture and life sciences from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia to build a joint master’s degree on the topic of Food Security and Climate Change. These HEIs have been working together within the Southeast Asian University Consortium for Graduate Education in Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC) since 1989 and have a concrete experience of exchanges in Science and Academic programmes but never reached the level of building a joint degree. The MS FSCC was designed on the model of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degrees in Europe. It aimed at responding to acute needs in the professional sector that developed recently, where each individual university may not have all the disciplinary resources to address such topics at the highest (postgraduate) level. This difficulty is generally increased when the professional targets of the learning objectives lead to multidisciplinary orientations of teaching and research. A consortium of universities sharing common learning objectives and organising the mobility of students according to their individual academic strengths was assumed to be in a better position than individual Universities to produce graduates relevant to the market needs. This is the case with Food Security and Climate Change to prepare graduates to work at implementing the commitments of the member countries at the last Paris Conference on Climate Change, while taking into consideration the challenges of food security linked with the recent implementation of the ASEAN integrated market. This corresponds to a new professional challenge in the area of agriculture in SE Asia. The UC has the necessary skills to address this challenge, but individually, none have all the skills needed to properly address the training needs in this domain. Building a joint degree and using mobility to get the best offer in the region may better address that new challenge rather than what they would do individually. Simultaneously with the development of the synopsis of joint MS FSCC programme was the challenge of offering a dual/double degree, an innovation that the UC had never done before. By building common rules to govern within the MS FSCC: exchange/mobility of students, mutual recognition of courses between pairs of Universities within the UC, organisation of summer schools to offer courses to accommodate all students, option to have one semester mobility in Europe to complement the local supply of courses, FSCC-wide quality assurance system recognised by each of the collaborating Universities, and joint evaluation of master thesis between academic teams, Departments, Faculties of the different co-graduating Universities, the UC has experimented agreements that lead to building other post graduate joint programmes, a major institutional innovation in the SE Asian academic world. Whereas building this joint degree was much inspired by the European experience of the Erasmus Mundus programme, it required several adaptations and innovative rules in the participating Universities’ academic systems. These adaptations took more time than initially expected as it had to be accepted in five Universities in parallel and in real practice, for real students, in a real joint programme, and not just in theory. These innovations have been clearly identified, and at least they have been addressed in the case of a first collaborative programme, run with three successive cohorts of students.

MICROCASA is the first international project aimed at sharing the European experiences and building institutional capacities in Southeast Asia to co-create, promote and deliver short competence-oriented educational units leading to micro-credentials with the goal of solving various economic and social problems. Focusing on different aspects of micro-credentialing, for instance course content co-creation, educational technology, transparent quality assurance, technologies for issuance and verification of digital micro-credentials, the project builds a comprehensive set of competences and technical capacities in Southeast Asian Universities. Leveraging on the partner networks, as well as on the links to the national educational authorities and regional initiatives, MICROCASA has an ambition to have a systemic impact on the ASEAN region as a whole. The project plan builds around the following groups of activities:•Regional Micro-credentials Study and Roundtables, which will allow gathering factual data and experts opinions about the barriers and enablers for introducing micro-credentials into the regional HEIs, as well as to benchmark the regional approaches to the ones in the EU;•Micro-credentials capacity building Programme covering all abovementioned aspects of micro-credentialing;•Pilot development, delivery and evaluation of the set of Digital Competences courses granting micro-credentials;•Targeted awareness raising and dissemination activities spreading the excellence beyond the project consortium.On the European side, the project consortium includes 3 European Universities with complementary competences, Italian NARIC Agency and the quality assurance expert company. The representative group of 6 Southeast Asian University includes central agenda-setting national Universities, as well as Universities with regional development missions.

Knowledge-based societies are underpinned by solid capacities in Intellectual Property (IP), research and innovation (R&I). These three pillars are closely interrelated, being sound IP practice instrumental in managing R&I effectively. The increased sophistication of research and global demand for competitive R&I conform challenging scenarios for HEIs, particularly in regions with unsteady IP systems, such as the ASEAN, where IP legislation and performance differs from country to country. The endeavours made at the regional level to align IP practice with international standards need to be supplemented with institutional actions of different nature if HEIs genuinely aspire to become active components in the innovation chain.Against this background, SPIRE’s overall objective is contributing to the effectiveness of R&I management at the PC HEIs by enhancing IP capacities at three complementary levels, thereby addressing major difficulties identified in the target ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand): ➢ Knowledge & kills of staff and students, by transferring good practices from EU HEIs, and implementing the Capacity Building Programme (on-site/online) for professional development;➢ Infrastructure & policy, by setting up IP Management Units (IPMUs) at HEIs to provide comprehensive and centralised IP assistance, and formulating/upgrading institutional IP policies; and ➢ Regional cooperation, by promoting regional-wide initiatives, such as a functional IP Network for HEIs, able to pass on experiences from more advanced countries to less developed ones and boost improvement.

The role of a modern University in the society is dramatically changed due to economic, social and, as a matter of fact, technological revolutions we are living in. In contrast to a traditional Humbolt University model, Universities across the globe become knowledge service providers to the economy and society at large. In this context, the latest explosion of Massive Open Online educational services/Courses (MOOCs, 2012 was declared as a Year of MOOCs, NYT) is confirming the general trend and opens new avenues for linking Universities and their external customers via powerful ICT means. When Europe is one of the global leaders in MOOC technologies, this innovation is still to come to Southeast Asia and the mission of the COMPETEN-SEA project is to enable the transfer of European experiences to the local partner Universities. The overall project aim is to make a significant contribution towards strengthening relations between higher education systems in Southeast Asia and wider economic and social environment by building organizational, pedagogical and technical capacities in local Universities to design, develop, market and deliver MOOCs for various economic and social problems. The project will implement the following activities:- Regional MOOC SWOT analysis and feasibility study to identify best strategies for educational outreach using MOOCs- Intensive MOOC Capacity Building programme aimed at building local capacities to develop MOOCs addressing local educational needs and deliver them to target users- Development and evaluation of the system of MOOCs addressing urgent socio-economic development needs - Dissemination and awareness raising campaign addressing academic communities in the region, as well as other key stakeholders: policy makers, potential users of MOOCs (e.g. public bodies, NGOs, businesses, etc.), general public. Importantly, the project will undertake efforts to integrate the regional MOOC specialists with the European MOOC movement.