The DTMS Lab exists to re-architect academic systems so that meta-skills become intentional, measurable, and sustainable outcomes.
That sentence is the lab’s own charge, published with the founder’s scholarly record. It is not a slogan added later. Design thinking is the method; academic management is the object; meta-skills are the outcome the method is supposed to make visible.
The laboratory sits in the Department of Educational Leadership at the International College, Payap University. The college’s graduate programs — a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy, both international, both approved by the University Board of Trustees on 14 June 2025 — are the students the lab is built with, not an audience it speaks at. Master’s and doctoral ELers signed, at the opening, for workshops and projects they would hold in common.
Payap was founded on 21 March 1974 by the Foundation of the Church of Christ in Thailand. The university motto is Truth – Service. The International College’s published values are Academic Excellence, Resilience, Respect for Diversity, and Community Service. The lab does not replace that frame. It gives the Educational Leadership programs a research instrument inside it: human-centered design used on curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and the leadership that holds them together.
Four capacities
The public framework is four domains and seventeen meta-skills. The domains are the part the lab teaches by name. In the launch films they are also four verbs: think, connect, create, decide.
Adaptive ExpertiseThink
The capacity to meet a new academic problem without abandoning what is already known — to flex routines, not discard them.
Relational DynamicsConnect
Leadership as a relationship: mentoring, faculty coordination, and the trust that lets Master’s and doctoral students work across a project.
Creative AgilityCreate
Design thinking in motion — prototypes of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, tried before they are scaled.
Strategic SynthesisDecide
Turning evidence, priorities, and constraints into a decision a school or a university can actually carry.
The seventeen constituent skills are taught inside the MOOC — Episode 1 states the count — and are not reprinted here as a list the films have not yet published line by line. AI literacy is treated as a meta-skill in its own right, in four further domains from the 2026 Frontiers in Education model: Engaging with AI, Creating with AI, Designing AI, and Managing AI.
Research aims
- 01
Measurable, not ornamental
Meta-skills are managed outcomes of academic work — curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment — not a slogan printed beside them.
- 02
The full management cycle
Design thinking runs from needs analysis and priority setting through prototyping, implementation, and outcome evaluation.
- 03
AI literacy as a meta-skill
Following the 2026 four-domain model: Engaging with AI, Creating with AI, Designing AI, and Managing AI — including governance, ethics, and institutional alignment, not tool use alone.
- 04
Teacherpreneurship
How educators in private universities innovate when market and policy both press, and how that leadership is distributed across academic roles.
- 05
A shared bench
Master’s and doctoral students, faculty, schools, and international partners on the same projects. The opening signature was the first act of that bench.
- 06
An ethical horizon
Payap’s motto is Truth – Service. The college names Academic Excellence, Resilience, Respect for Diversity, and Community Service. The lab’s leaders are meant to be ethical as well as adaptive.
Impact
Impact, for this lab, is not a count of views. It is a change in how a program decides what a graduate can do. Graduate readiness, in the founder’s systematic review with Sukanya Chaemchoy and Pruet Siribanpitak, is the question meta-skills were invented to answer. If a private university cannot say which meta-skills it is building, and whether the building worked, the innovation is still a poster.
The geographic horizon named by the lab is Southeast Asia and beyond, from a campus in Chiang Mai. The scholarly horizon is wider than one country: the founding evidence was built in Sichuan’s private higher education institutions, and the 2026 papers stay close to Chinese private universities, institutional tiers, and teacherpreneurship. Payap is the place the work is now led from — not a claim that the only data are Thai.
A second impact is pedagogical. The MOOC — The Story of Meta-skills, Teacherpreneurship, AI-Enabled Assessment, and the fourth film — is how the lab teaches its own research without waiting for a classroom timetable. The promo films do the institutional introduction. The episodes do the argument.
Development goals
Near term, the goal is the bench the opening signed: Master’s and Ph.D. students on shared workshops and projects, with faculty, and with schools that will let leadership be observed rather than only described. Field-based learning is already a department practice. The lab’s version of it is a design cycle with an evaluation at the end.
The partnership goal is already in motion, and it is specific.
- Dr. Brian K. Perkins, Teachers College, Columbia University — design thinking for transformational leadership.
- Dr. Oliver Crocco, Louisiana State University — academic engagement with the department’s launch.
- Hungary: Óbuda University, ELTE Faculty of Education and Psychology, and Budapest Metropolitan University.
- Ohio University — memorandum of understanding for exchange, research, and dialogue.
- India and the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia.
- Chulalongkorn University and the ICESML academic platform.
The longer trajectory is the sentence the lab already uses. Keep meta-skills intentional, measurable, and sustainable — including where AI now sits inside assessment and academic management. The department has also named the human remainder: when a model can answer, a teacher still has a craft. A TED conversation on that theme is announced for March 2027. It is a horizon, not a completed project.
Trajectory
2012
Meta-skills named
Marty Neumeier’s Metaskills treats imagination as the skill that makes other skills possible. The lab’s own MOOC begins its story here: from 2012 to the age of AI. The lab’s phrase is the same idea in an academic key — meta-skills are the master skills that unlock other skills.
2018
Skills 4.0
Skills Development Scotland’s Skills 4.0 frame enters the lineage the lab cites in public. Meta-skills are no longer only a design argument; they are a workforce and education argument.
2013–2024
A practice before the laboratory
Chinese language teaching at Opole University of Technology and Chongqing University; English, IELTS and study-tour leadership at New Oriental and Southwest Jiaotong University Hope College; vice-deanship of the English major at Geely University of China. The problem the doctorate would name was already in the work: how a private university actually manages learning.
2024–2025
The doctorate
Ph.D. in Educational System Management Leadership, Chulalongkorn University (2025). The dissertation — Academic management innovation based on the concept of meta skills for private higher education institutions in Sichuan, China — is the lab’s founding research.
14 June 2025
The programs
Payap University’s Board of Trustees, meeting 46/2025, approves the M.A. and Ph.D. in Educational Leadership (International Program). M.A.: two years, 36 credits. Ph.D.: three years, 48 credits. Instruction in English or Chinese. Recruitment and teaching open from Academic Year 2025, Semester 2.
October 2025
The appointment
Dr. Chi Che becomes Head of the Educational Leadership Department and Lecturer at the International College, and Founder and Academic Lead of the Design Thinking for Metaskills Development Lab.
2026
The evidence
Eleven of sixteen peer-reviewed articles appear in this year, including two Scopus Q1 papers: AI literacy as a four-domain meta-skill (Frontiers in Education) and AI-enabled assessment across university tiers (Social Sciences & Humanities Open). Beside them: institutional design thinking, teacherpreneurship, and the Empathy-to-Execution model.
26 October 2026
The opening
Master’s and Ph.D. ELers gather at the International College for the official opening. They sign for cross-sectional collaboration — workshops and projects shared between the two programs. The public charge is the seal’s lower rim: innovate, learn, and empower.
Forward
The trajectory
Re-architect academic systems so that meta-skills become intentional, measurable, and sustainable outcomes. Keep the lab a site of research-informed practice, cross-border exchange, and the preparation of ethical, adaptive educational leaders for Southeast Asia and beyond.
Sources for this briefing are the lab and department pages of Payap Educational Leadership, the founder’s site drchiche.com, and the public wording of the film series. The founder’s honor page carries the appointments and the papers. The films carry the voice.
The International College, Payap University, Super-highway Chiang Mai – Lampang Road, Amphur Muang, Chiang Mai 50000, Thailand