Abstract:
This research aimed to analyze the environment (Environmental Analysis) both internal and external of Rajabhat Universities, to study and analyze the upcoming situations which will affect to the transformation of Rajabhat Universities in the future, to create and present the future scenario of transformation in Rajabhat Universities in Future Wheels form and to present the policy recommendations for bringing the future wheels to guide the transformation of Rajabhat Universities. The samples included 4 experts in higher education, 6 committees of the Rajabhat University Council, 4 administrators of Rajabhat University, 4 community leaders, 9 graduate users, and 60 faculty members and administrators. The tools of this research were document analysis forms, questionnaires, interview forms, and assessment form of the future wheels. As for the data analysis: content analysis method was used by categorizing the issues, providing frequency tables, finding the median and the interquartile range. The results of the research are summarized as follows. 1. The environment of Rajabhat Universities consists of 5 aspects, namely higher education standards, production and teacher development, local development, enhance the quality of education, and management system development. The overall environment are as follow, (1) Strengths: Rajabhat Universities have a close relationship to the community, have the local knowledge with 38 institutions network across the country, have the sufficient resources for operations, and have clear policies and missions. (2) Weaknesses: The weak cooperative networks, the data linking is not effective enough to bring information to improve operations in each aspect. (3) Opportunities: to provide support at the policy level by setting clear development goals, having the budget support from the government and the work in a network through the President's meeting leads to the clear and strong policies and guidelines and (4) Threats: the number of students are decreasing with higher educational costs and inflexible rules, regulations, or procedures. 2. The transformation of Rajabhat Universities have 5 aspects as mentioned above, these will show in the first level of the future wheels. The result found that there are 3 overall transformations are as follow, to provide a local database system, to build a sustainable cooperation network, and to extend the local knowledge. There are 4 specific transformations as follow, the determination of specialization, to provide missions to meet all ages development, to develop faculties, and to reform the management system. Those will show in the second level of the future wheels, with the guidelines of those transformations in the third level of the future wheels. 3. The policy guidelines divided into 3 levels; (1) Institutional level: using the future wheels as a framework for determining the specific expertise of each institution as the main conceptual framework, and use it as the basis for formulating policies, system, mechanism, and operational guidelines of Rajabhat University in the Transformation era. To change the mindset of faculty and staff to be ready for the transformation. However each aspects of the transformation can be operated simultaneously. Because the operation of higher education institutions is necessary to consistently drive all missions and strategies to the same direction. However, it has to take into account their own potential, readiness and context. (2) Faculty level: Each faculty has a focus on expertise by sticking to the main focus at the institutional level as the core. To build cooperation across disciplines to integrate the knowledge, resources, and expertise of each faculty together as well as jointly to build networks with the government, private sectors, entrepreneurs, local schools, and local scholars in order to exchange knowledge and bring knowledge from various sectors to integrate with the implementation of the mission, and building an efficient local database as a base for determining the policy for further mission operations; and (3) at the individual level, namely faculty and personnel need to change the mindset to be flexible and more responsive to the transformation, to collaborate across disciplines to integrate and exchange knowledge on operational guidelines and knowledge between, and define the focus of each individual according to their aptitude to allocate manpower to suit the mission that will be assigned to take responsibility for.