267Higher Education is the area where both types of HEIs share the mutual responsibil-
ity of promoting courses and programmes as well as strengthening research capacities.
However, following the 1999 Education Reform in Thailand, teaching colleges or those
institutes formerly focused on training education personnel have been transformed into
full-fledged comprehensive universities. Their academic visions and missions have
been altered to suit the competing landscape of the massification of Higher Education
by expanding services to cover areas larger than education. These areas include the
Sciences or Social Sciences in some institutes. The transformation of the former teach-
ing colleges to Rajabhat universities has, in a way, redirected the former teaching col-
leges to compete and excel in new areas of the playing field. On the one hand, it may
help Thailand in addressing the problem of access and equity by instating another 40
comprehensive universities in Thailand. On the other hand, their previous strengths in
offering courses and programmes in Curriculum and Instruction Development,
Pedagogy or Subject-based Teaching with the aim to produce graduates who would
continue their careers as teachers or educators have also somewhat diminished. The
upgrade of Rajabhat universities was also perceived as the expansion of higher educa-
tion at the expense of education quality (Lao 2015 ). As will be discussed later in section
“Current status of programmes offered in the area of education and higher education”,
courses and programmes offered in the area of education in many Rajabhat universities
have become rather limited, even at the level of bachelor’s degree programmes, not to
mention the lack of tangible courses and programmes at the postgraduate level in these
institutions.
The prospect of strengthening Higher Education as a discipline in Thailand is
more evident among research-intensive or traditional public HEIs. Teaching and
research usually go hand in hand in leading HEIs through the Faculty of Education.
Examples of these HEIs include Chulalongkorn University, Srinakharinwirot
University, Khon Khaen University, Prince of Songkla University and Chiang Mai
University. Education research has emerged in these universities based on a large
pool of subjects, areas of concentration, teaching courses, learning courses and pro-
grammes in these universities. Popular areas of research include Instruction and
Curriculum Development, Educational Research and Educational Psychology,
Educational Policy and Management, Education Technology, Adult Learning and
Subject-based Education. The aforementioned freedom enjoyed by HEIs in
Thailand, aided by a situation where the OHEC has not included education as one
of the areas of research excellence for centres of excellence (CoEs), has resulted in
a situation where the future and prospects of education teaching and learning, as
well as research, lie very much in the hands of individual institutions. As described
in Table 15.1, the main distinctions between the two types of HEIs, Rajabhat uni-
versities and research-intensive universities, are as follows.
15 Higher Education Research in Thailand: Current Trends and Development