Educational Forum 2025: Building bridges in education in the digital transformation era in Southeast Asia

29/09/2025

On September 29, 2025, SEAMEO RETRAC successfully organized the Educational Forum on “Building bridges in education in the digital transformation era in Southeast Asia” at its premises, from 13:30 to 17:00 (GMT +7/Vietnam Time).

The Forum, conducted back-to-back with SEAMEO RETRAC’s 28th Governing Board Meeting, provided a professional platform for RETRAC Governing Board Members who are policymakers, educational leaders, and professional educators from SEAMEO Member Countries to exchange insights, share innovative practices, and discuss policy directions for promoting digital transformation in education across the region.

This year’s Forum focused on fostering regional collaboration and sustainable innovation through five key sub-themes:

Innovative approaches and/or practices of leadership and management in education in digital transformation context (i.e. basic education and higher education levels);
Opportunities and challenges faced by schools and institutions and related solutions or initiatives that help to transform challenges into opportunities to promote innovative leadership, management, teaching and learning;
Policy innovations or changes to support ministries, institutions in sustaining local innovation or protecting data privacy and promoting ethical technology use;
Accelerating capacity building initiatives to provide educational leaders, administrators and teaching staff with knowledge and resources to integrate digital skills and competencies into leadership, management, curricular and teaching practice; and,
Harnessing local and global lessons and practices to enable institutions to share successes and setbacks, adapting global digital education trends to the local and unique needs as well as strengths of the Southeast Asian region for localized and sustainable growth.

Speakers of the Forum were SEAMEO RETRAC Governing Board Members who are senior leaders, managers, and administrators from Ministries of Education and higher education institutions in Southeast Asian countries. Each country representative presented a report highlighting ongoing initiatives, innovative models, and national efforts in digital transformation in education.

The Forum also welcomed over 100 participants from across Southeast Asia and beyond via both in-person and online participation, creating an inclusive platform to build bridges and advance digital educational cooperation in the region.