THE Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA) is set to launch a standalone micro-credentials policy which opens up the market to training providers beyond higher education institutions, including industry, by next year.
Its deputy chief executive officer (Quality Assurance) Prof Khairul Salleh Mohamed Sahari (pic) said this allows for the leveraging of existing short courses offered by many providers for upskilling, reskilling and professional development purposes.
“We offer additional benefit to these short courses by providing quality assurance, if they fulfil the requirements of having modules constructed in an outcome-based manner and ensuring learners fulfil these outcomes and carry credit balance,” he told StarEdu at the inaugural Global Lifelong Learning Summit (GLLS) held in Singapore last month.
“This means that if courses are registered with the MQA, learners can carry credits, accumulate, mix and match with other micro-credentials, and be able to exit with a formal qualification as a result of the stacking up of credentials, which will be better in terms of career progression,” he added.
This new policy is in addition to another micro-credentials policy which the agency came up with in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
“This first policy allows for unbundling or unpacking from academic programmes where higher education institutions can offer micro-credentials that originate from their programmes. These are small bite-sized courses,” he said.
“All short courses can be registered with us as micro-credentials, as long as they meet two criteria: learners have to be assessed to meet outcomes, and the credentials have to be credit-bearing,” he emphasised.
These courses, he added, are aimed at allowing learners to accumulate micro-credentials and use that as a pathway to enrol in academic programmes even though they do not fulfil entry requirements.
“To facilitate their entrance into these programmes, we dedicate a pathway which we call APEL.M (accreditation of prior experiential learning with micro-credentials),” he said, adding that the agency has introduced several types of APEL – APEL.A (access), APEL.C (credit transfer) and APEL.Q (award of academic qualifications) – in its bid to support lifelong learning initiatives.
In coming up with the micro-credentials policies, Prof Khairul said the agency engaged with stakeholders including industries, trade unions, manufacturers, employers, employees, traditional short course providers, funding bodies and regulators.
According to Prof Khairul, the key lesson the agency has learnt from the development of the policies is that the entire ecosystem has to be in place in order to capture the attention of stakeholders.
“We need everybody to be on the same team,” he said, adding that the Human Resource Development Corporation (HRD Corp) and the Social Security Organisation (Socso) are two organisations in the agency’s pilot study for the standalone micro-credentials.
If implemented carefully, Unicef Generation Unlimited programme consultant Mami Kyo said, micro-credentials have the potential to serve as an equaliser to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 4, which entails leaving no one behind.
This is all the more crucial in a world that has seen the pandemic reverse 15 years of progress in reducing youth unemployment rate, as well as exacerbate the pre-existing learning and skilling crisis, she added, while drawing on International Labour Organization estimates that there were 282 million young people who were not in education, employment and training in 2020.
Both Prof Khairul and Mami presented their views at the GLLS. — By ROWENA CHUA
