In November 2018, Vice President Dr. Roland Tsai and Chief Officer of International and Cross-Strait Affairs Dr. Hsiao-Ling Huang, both of Yuanpei University of Medical Technology (YUMT), met with President Eugenia Chang of Datong Community College of Taipei City to initiate our assessment of practice of regional and community engagement.

Dr. Hsiao-Ling Huang of YUMT serves as the leader of this self-evaluation project. Marten Ma is the chief coordinator for most of the meetings.. Sheng-peng Wu, Marten Ma and Sam Brooks rendered the appraisal schedule into Mandarin Chinese.

Yuanpei University of Medical Technology cherishes this opportunity to work with PASCAL on benchmarking against the high standards of institutional community engagement. Our faculty and staff met and discussed in detail the appraisal schedule and how YUMT interacts with the local and regional community. With the lead of Dr. Tsai and Dr. Huang, the staff worked carefully and responsibly together to resolve issues concerning evaluation and translation.

We hope that after the PASCAL international team come to visit Taiwan on March 2019, all the staff in Yuanpei University of Medical Technology will have a more thorough understanding of community engagement and institutional social responsibility. YUMT as a higher education provider will continue to seek further improvement in this regard.

Written by Eugenia Chang & Marten Ma

Professor Michael Osborne, Director of the European Centre of PASCAL, added:

The PASCAL team involved in this work, who are John Tibbitt, Roberta Piazza and myself, are delighted with this opportunity to share our thinking, and look forward to further exchanges shortly in Taipei. This project, Widening Regional Engagement of HE and TVET at the University of Glasgow is funded under by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) through an Impact Acceleration Grant (IAA), ES/M500471/1. It seeks to:

• Support further work to review and enhance a template to map the engagement of universities with their cities and regions for use in the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector in Hong Kong, Italy and the UK
• Adapt a revised benchmarking tool to create an online version; and
• Promote its use nationally and in an international context.

Through the separate financial support of our colleagues in Taiwan we have been able to extend the work there not only in the TVET sector with Datong Community College, but also at Yuanpei University of Medical Technology (YUMT), this further promoting the use of the approach internationally.