Saturday June 6, 2009

From quality control to quality assurance and enhancement

PEOPLE see private tertiary education in Malaysia as a showcase of entrepreneurship and free enterprise. The business is often thought of as one of those industries that have independently prospered, their growth largely driven by the players’ initiative and enthusiasm rather than by Government will.

That is not true, of course. Some policy decisions have had deep impact on the industry, and one of these was the move in the mid-1990s to increase access to higher education by expanding the public tertiary education system and liberalising the private education sector.

But these measures alone might have led to unwanted consequences. Something else had to be in place to counterbalance the ill-effects of sudden growth.

Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA) chief executive officer Datuk Syed Ahmad Hussein explains: “There’s this general theory that an increase in access will lead to a decline in quality. It’s easier and faster to increase access and add to the numbers than to increase resources to accommodate the higher enrolment numbers.

“Malaysia decided that the increase in access must not be at the expense of quality. And that’s why the National Accreditation Board or LAN (the Bahasa Malaysia abbreviation) was formed.”

Established in November 2007 following the merger between LAN and Higher Education Ministry’s Quality Assurance Division, the MQA is responsible for quality assurance of higher education for both the public and the private sectors, using the Malaysian Qualifications Framework (MQF) as a basis.

The agency monitors and oversees the quality assurance practices and accreditation of national higher education.

The industry seems happy that the MQA is around. National Association of Private Educational Institutions president Elajsolan Mohan says the agency’s work has contributed to the growth of private higher education in recent years because it has bolstered confidence in the quality of education.

“The MQA has added value. We are always asked if our courses are accredited by the MQA. Before this, there was no benchmark. People made all sorts of claims and there was no proof. So these quality measures and benchmarking standards are helping the public in making decisions,” he explains.

Malaysia Association of Private Colleges and Universities president Dr Parmjit Singh points out that the MQA’s role has shifted from merely being a watchdog to that of elevating higher education to world-class standards through quality and accreditation mechanisms and standards.

He says: “This reassures students and parents on the local and international fronts. More importantly, the establishment of the MQA signifies a unification of quality assurance activities of both public and private sector institutions, which is in itself a recognition of the equal importance placed on the private sector.”

Syed Ahmad says an important part of the agency’s job is to make people buy the idea that quality pays, and that it is not just the right thing to do.

“We began as the policeman, as the regulator. But we went out of our way to convince private colleges and universities that quality was about more than laws and regulations. You can only increase confidence via quality,” he adds.

“As a quality assurance body, our main job is to plant confidence in the consumers that these products have reached certain standards that we certify. We have learnt together that the responsibility for assuring quality lies with the institutions themselves.”

The MQA receives hundreds of telephone calls daily from consumers who want to check the accreditation status of courses.

“Increasingly, the bigger regulators are the students and their parents. They are the ones who have been making enquiries with us, and some of the enquiries are very persistent. As the cost of education increases, the concern for quality increases accordingly,” says Syed Ahmad.

He adds that the agency’s immediate challenge is to ensure compliance with the MQF, which the Cabinet approved for implementation in December 2005.

“It’s new and we have to give people time to comply with it. We are moving more and more towards measuring students’ learning time and not just their contact hours. We are emphasising learning outcomes,” he says.

“This is the bigger challenge – to move away from the traditional lecturer-centred learning to student-centred learning with clear outcomes.” Other challenges include strengthening the institutions’ internal quality mechanisms and getting more assessors for the accreditation process.

A major target for the MQA is the introduction of self-accreditation. Syed Ahmad says the agency wants to move from quality control to quality assurance to quality enhancement. In this approach, it is increasingly the responsibility of the institutions to have quality assurance.

“We believe the idea of assuring quality and creating confidence has become part and parcel of higher education in Malaysia. Now we are moving to the second phase of quality assurance and enhancement,” he adds.

“Ideally, quality assurance will one day be done internally, and all we do is verify through periodic auditing by peers. While we are doing external quality assurance now, we are encouraging the establishment of internal quality assurance.

“Self-accreditation is really the accreditation of the institution’s internal quality mechanism, with all the processes and procedures for quality assurance. With a strong internal quality mechanism, the institution can accredit its own courses. It’s like having a mini MQA within itself.”

More News

Business Links

Latest Jobs from Star-Jobs

Latest from StarProperty