The Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and the University of the Philippines Manila (UP Manila) recently inked a Memorandum of Agreement to provide a short-term scholarship to at least 2,300 faculty members, non-teaching personnel, and researchers under the Higher Education Upskilling and Study for Advancement of Staff and Faculty or HUSAY Program.
The ₱80.43 million program on Bio-Health Education, Artificial Intelligence – Enabled Capacity Building, Optimization, and Innovation (BEACON) Program covers the scholar’s learning materials, program kits, resource persons, accommodations, meals, incidentals, travel and transportation expenses under the approved financial plan. The BEACON program is open to any eligible education personnel or faculty from a CHED-accredited higher educational institution and the application period will start in March 2026 up to December 2026.
Guided by CHED Memorandum Orders No. 15 (s. 2023) and No. 8 (s. 2025), the HUSAY Program supports upskilling/reskilling programs and institutional capacity-building across higher education institutions.
According to Chancellor Michael Tee, the UP Manila BEACON project partners with CHED in strengthening institutional integrity, ethics and AI in teaching and research by providing reskilling and up-skilling courses for CHED-accredited faculty and staff. The three clusters for these courses under (1) Biomedical Education & Pedagogy, (2) Biomedical Research, Technology & Ethics, and (3) Environmental & Occupational Practice utilizing AI-enabled virtual learning will provide high-impact benefits for the CHED-accredited institutions. Foremost among the courses are Empowering Medical Educators through a UNESCO-Aligned Artificial Intelligence (AI) Competency Development Course, Advancing Medical Education through Simulation Course, and Research Integrity in Bio-Health Sciences & Digital Health Ethics (RIDE).
“UP Manila will always be para sa bayan as the national health sciences center providing relevant, readily accessible, state of the art courses in the biomedical field that will help upskill and re-skill our Filipino faculty & staff in every higher education institution in the Philippines,” BEACON project proponent, Dr. Lenora Fernadez said during the MOA signing on Dec. 1, 2025.#
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