Why Chulalongkorn University Built a College with No Professors of Its Own

 

Chulalongkorn's newest college has no professors of its own — instead it borrows the whole university to build courses a changing job market demands. 

 

A finance company came to Chulalongkorn University with an oddly specific request: an artificial intelligence course, but not a general one — AI built specifically for consumer lending. No single faculty at the university could have supplied it alone. So the university didn't ask one to.

 

It pulled engineering and science faculty together with accounting faculty, stitched their expertise into a single course, and delivered exactly what the client had asked for.

 

That is the entire operating logic of Chula XL, the College of Extension and Lifelong Learning for the People, Chulalongkorn University, launched publicly at SIAMSCAPE on 24 December 2025 under university president Professor Dr Wilert Puriwat, who described it as a decisive step towards Chulalongkorn becoming "a university for the people".

 

Less than a year old, it has already been named among the university's ten highlights of 2026 — recognition, officials say, of a genuinely new model for connecting the university's knowledge to the public.

 

 

 

The architect of that matchmaking is Professor Polkit Sangvanich, Chula XL's dean. He previously ran the Faculty of Science, overseeing 400 academics, 300 staff and 40 buildings.

 

His new college carries the same institutional rank — but a staff of four.

 

"From 800 down to four," he says, only half-joking. "Much less tiring — but the workload isn't small at all."

 

 

 

 

A university rethinks what it's for

That contradiction — a lean operation with an outsized mandate — reflects a diagnosis Professor Polkit has made of higher education itself.

 

"In the past, you studied at university once, in one period of your life, then you left to work — and that was it," he explains. "Now knowledge, technology and skills change so fast that this old model has stopped working."

 

People returning to study today, he says, rarely want another degree.

 

"They just want the knowledge and the skills to do their current job or to do something new they want to do."

 

Because Chula XL has no professors of its own, it functions as connective tissue across the university's faculties, assembling bespoke courses — like the AI-for-lending example — on demand.

 

"I'm the door that opens and closes onto the whole of Chulalongkorn," he says. "If I want accounting skills, I knock on the accounting faculty... In that sense, 3,000 professors are my professors."

 

What distinguishes this from the university's earlier online offerings, including its long-running MOOC-style platform, is what happens after a learner enrols.

 

"We put the learner at the centre," Professor Polkit says. "We build what we call a learner profile — that's the keyword."

 

Each learner gets an ID, much like a student registration number, and the system tracks accumulated skills against it — surfacing, for instance, that someone has taken several AI courses but still lacks a specific competency, then recommending the course that closes the gap.

 

Delivery isn't confined to video lectures, either. "I handle online, on-site, workshops, hybrid formats, short training courses," he says. "It's not only online."

 

 

 

Since January's launch, the college has produced roughly 67 new courses this way, on top of a legacy library of some 200 to 300 courses inherited from earlier platforms.

 

 

The economics of "free" knowledge

Pressed by university colleagues who ask why courses that were once free now carry a fee, Professor Polkit doesn't dodge the question.

 

"There's no such thing as free," he says flatly. "It's not really free — because someone is paying. The university is paying."

 

Producing a properly filmed, accredited course requires real investment, he argues, and a module too few people watch simply isn't worth sustaining.

 

Some content stays free, earning only an attendance certificate rather than a verified credential. Learners wanting official recognition — and the systematic data-gathering behind it — pay a course fee, though he insists cost is rarely the barrier people imagine.

 

"Most courses are in the hundreds or low thousands of baht. That's it."

 

What learners are really buying into, he says, is a credentialing system tied to national infrastructure.

 

Chula XL supports the accumulation and recognition of learning outcomes through the Credit Bank system. Any recognition or transfer of credits into formal degree programmes is subject to the relevant academic rules and approval processes.

 

"We can't award a degree," he says. "But we can award a certified skill."

 

 

From conscripts to CEOs

The learner base spans an unusually wide range. High-school students take courses to bank credit before university or build application portfolios.

 

Corporate clients — the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Labour, Thai Airways, CP Group — send staff through the platform; the Defence Ministry alone channels tens of thousands of conscripts a year into courses on air-conditioning repair and online selling, skills meant to carry them into civilian life.

 

"I don't care what age or background someone is," Professor Polkit says. "I care whether you know what skill you want to build."

 

Officially verified learners under the Chula XL brand number in the tens of thousands so far — modest against the millions who once passed through predecessor platforms, but, he stresses, a more rigorous baseline.

 

 

What to learn now

Asked which three skills matter most this year, he doesn't hesitate: artificial intelligence literacy — "not necessarily coding, but knowing how AI works and using it effectively" — critical thinking paired with data analysis, and, above all, adaptability.

 

"AI is the trend today; in three or four years it might be something else entirely," he says. "But the ability to keep learning new things — that skill never goes out of date."

 

For a university built on prestige and permanence, Chula XL is a wager on the opposite instinct: that relevance now has to be earned continuously, course by course, credential by credential — assembled, as the lending-AI course showed, from whatever corner of the university the moment demands.

 

The ability to keep learning never goes out of date. Start your next learning journey with Chula XL and explore courses designed to help you adapt, grow, and stay ready for what’s next.

 

Discover more at https://chulaxl.chula.ac.th/