SEAMEO RIHED supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is implementing the project Harmonization and Networking in Higher Education, Building a Common Credit Transfer System for Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) and beyond aiming at providing GMS (+ ASEAN + Japan + Korea) means for harmonizing existing credit transfer arrangements in higher education. The project is structured in four stages: Explore, Experiment, Experience and Expandseeking to create a regional and all inclusive academic credit transfer framework.

Universities and higher education institutions are using different credit transfer systems to foster students’ mobility; however the number of students actually moving within the region remains relatively small. This may be due to, among other factors, the fact that existing CTS’s in the region are either too general and all too inclusive or too narrow and applicable to only limited number of universities.

In the last few years higher education in the region has grown in size, fluidity and complexity due to aspects like the expansion in the number of public and private institutions; the changing nature of study programmes, their goals and audiences; the growing demand and supply of educational services, as can be observed in the booming request from the students for additional and more varied programmes, notably in those that offer international articulation, a good example of this is that in 2004 more than 50% of overseas students to Thailand alone were from GMS. The region also shows a growing supply in programmes run in foreign languages, particularly in English, while education as a whole is increasingly becoming a more for-profit area.

Aspects of this sort lead to a context where ensuring quality of education becomes more challenging, while at the same time the complexity of the system calls for more standardized and simpler ways to address the increasing demands from society and particularly from students regarding “easy and speedy ways” to facilitate mobility horizontally (higher education institutions and countries) and vertically (lifelong learning).

To address those demands, the project Harmonization and Networking in Higher Education, Building a Common Credit Transfer System for GMS and beyond is presented as an action research proposed in four stages: Explore, Experiment, Experience and Expand, seeking to create a regional credit transfer system framework based on lessons learnt from previous experiences; to improve articulation of existing systems, to enhance effectiveness, and to boost mobility and integration in the region.