Worakanya Buranaphatthana

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.