The recent Malaysian Education Summit not only provided an opportunity to discover Quest International University Perak (QIUP) in close but also to hear the merging trends and how education today can meet the needs of tomorrow.
The 22nd Summit organized by the Asian Strategy & Leadership Institute (ASLI) in Petaling Jaya saw QIUP’s Registrar, Muhammad MG Omar presenting a talk titled – Rethinking Education: Education Today, Tomorrow’s Needs.
He opened with a question – How do we prepare our future graduates with emphasis on producing shuffle ready graduates than the shovel ready one. He said there will be Jobs that won’t exist in ten or twenty years and how graduates need to be prepared with future skills.
Touching on emerging trends, Muhammad said future graduates need to be equipped with soft skills and character building with an emphasis on adaptability, critical thinking, innovation and creativity as well as communication skills. He said QIUP is working towards a holistic graduate who knows to apply what he learns in a changing environment and adapts easily.
On the subject of competency-based education, Muhammad said QIUP is committed to outcome focussed education and it translates to the university industry-friendly curriculum design, innovative and technology assisted delivery, and continuous and competency based assessments. The integration of these three components ie. curriculum design, teaching delivery and assessment, is critical to QIUP academic offering. He arued that outcome based education is not entirely successful within the sphere of higher education as there is often greater emphasis on curriculum design, but sometimes lesser follow through with delivery and assessments. This is why QIUP put much emphasis on competency-based assessments. Those were the days of examination and memorisation.
