A Guideline for Developing Learning Society for Thailand

Abstract

It is accepted among many countries that developing learning society is one of the strategies to provide lifelong learning to people. This research was carried out with the objectives to: 1) synthesize the process of developing learning society for Thailand,and 2) develop a guideline manual for selecting and publicizing the learning community or learning society. The method of the study composed of 2 main phases. The first phase was a documentary research and studying cases study of learning societies in other countries. The second phase was a field study. For the field study, the researcher purposively selected 9 learning communities, which were accepted as learning societies, from 9 provinces in every part of the country. Then from each community, people who involve in operating learning community were purposively selected. They were: (1) 5 members of community committee; (2) 3 representative of villagers ; and (3) 2 representative of related agencies. The total samples from was 90 people. Research instruments composed of the community survey form and the structured interview formats for the 3 groups of the samples. The data, which was qualitative data, was analysed by content analysis.

The main findings were: -The process of developing learning society for Thailand included 13 steps. They were:- (1) selecting a community ; (2) initiating step; (3) setting up a core group; (4) expanding the interests; (5) searching steak-holders; (6) personnel development ; (7) analysing the community situation; (8) developing the community plan; (9) analysing capability of steak-holders; (10) organizing activities; (11) following-up and evaluation; (12) publicizing the results; and (13) network creation.The manual for selecting and publicizing learning community /society covered 3 main criterias. They were criteria for: the initiating step; the operating step and the outcomes step.