Effective cooperation among tertiary institutions to facilitate academic exchange through the ASEAN University Network (AUN). Obstacles lie in differences in the language medium, curricula and standards among ASEAN tertiary institutions as well as limited financial resources. A greater use of English would facilitate academic exchanges as well as achieve wider regional and international recognition for ASEAN tertiary institutions. Two European programmes worthy of study by ASEAN are the Erasmus Programme which started to be implemented in the European Union (EU) in 1987 and is funded from the EU budget to promote student exchanges for short-term study and internship (covering some 3 million students as of end of 2013), and the Bologna Process designed to ensure comparability in the standards and quality of higher education qualifications in the European Higher Education Area by making use of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System.