Chelsey LAIRD

Abstract: Higher education enters an era shaped by artificial intelligence, geopolitical uncertainty, and financial pressures with university networks facing growing expectations to remain relevant, inclusive, and sustainable. Networks continue to provide platforms for student mobility, partnership development, and collective engagement, but questions emerge about affordability, accessibility, institutional value, and relationships that underpin meaningful collaboration. The session examines a central tension in global higher education: University networks remain vital platforms for collaboration, yet current operating models limit access, reinforce prestige hierarchies, create dependency on individual champions, or widen inequalities in the AI age. These are especially relevant for institutions in resource-constrained, geographically distant, or underrepresented contexts across Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and beyond. This panel brings together perspectives from different models of university networking: TIME and Magalhaes as mature engineering mobility networks connecting Europe, Latin America and wider international partners; UMAP as a large-scale Asia-Pacific mobility platform; ATU-Net as a regional diversity alliance; and Ge4 Network as moderator, contributing a relationship-driven global perspective. Practical reforms--tiered membership models, sponsored access pathways, virtual-first engagement, AI-supported coordination, stronger institutionalisation of partnerships, and clearer measures of network impact are discussed. How university networks can remain not only efficient and connected, but genuinely human-centered in the AI age is answered. Learning objectives: By the end of the session, participants will be able to: - Analyse emerging challenges facing university networks in the AI age, particularly around inclusion, affordability, and sustainability. - Compare different models of university alliances and mobility platforms across Europe, Latin America, the Asia-Pacific and wider global contexts. Specifically, TIME and Magalhaes as mature engineering mobility networks connecting Europe, Latin America and wider international partners; UMAP as a large-scale Asia-Pacific mobility platform; ATU-Net as a regional diversity alliance; and Ge4 Network as moderator, contributing a relationship-driven global perspective. - Evaluate what AI can and cannot replace in partnership development, trust-building, and network collaboration. - Identify practical reforms that can support more inclusive, sustainable, and human-centered international partnerships. Target audience: International relations officers, those working in TNE, officers of networks and multilateral platforms, university officials working on partnerships and their sustainability, foundations and private equity firms involved in educational initiatives, government officials working in education.

Abstract: International partners seeking to work with Thai universities often face a fragmented landscape: dozens of separate institution-to-institution agreements, each slow to negotiate and uneven in capacity. This session introduces CUPT Global Mission — the internationalisation platform of the Council of University Presidents of Thailand (CUPT) — as a single national gateway through which overseas partners can reach the entire Thai higher-education sector. We show why one coordinated entry point benefits national-level partners—research funders, embassies and peer university bodies — by lowering transaction costs, pooling negotiating capacity, and enabling multi-destination mobility and capacity building at national scale, while keeping humans firmly at the centre in the AI age. Four cases ground the model; (1) Mitacs, a Canadian national-level MOU created matching-funded Globalink research internships, with CUPT coordinating co-payment and placing students from several Thai universities in Canada, (2) the Centre for Digital Media from Vancouver, a pathway partnership opens CUPT-wide scholarships into its Master of Digital Media, (3) expansion of network-to-network collaborations with UMAP and opening mobility opportunities to additional Thai universities, (4) the Czech Rectors Conference, a 2024 MOU and 2026 visit are shaping "roaming" multi-destination mobility. Participants will leave with a transferable model for sector-level partnership—and a practical route to engage Thai universities at scale. Learning objectives: 1. Explain how a national platform (CUPT Global Mission) works as a single gateway to an entire higher-education sector, and when this model outperforms bilateral agreements, with full reflections from Canadian partner from UMAP network 2. Identify the practical benefits for national-level partners—lower transaction costs, pooled negotiating capacity, coordinated co-funding and administration with example success cases 3. Assess how consortium platforms broaden student access through multi-destination mobility and national-scale capacity building 4. Apply a transferable framework to initiate or structure their own sector-level partnerships with Thai universities Target audience: International partners seeking to engage Thai universities at scale: national research and funding agencies, embassy education attachés, and peer sector bodies such as national rectors' conferences.