KUALA LUMPUR: Education experts have called on the government to create a new millennium policy or guidelines for the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Programme to support the aspiration to empower the field in the 12th Malaysia Plan (12MP).
Director of the Malaysian Vocational Education and Training Research Institute, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM), Assoc Prof Dr Razali Hassan said the formulation of the policy should give emphasis to effective teaching and learning (P&P) method so that TVET would not be seen as just an alternative education for school dropouts.
He said technological changes which followed the fourth industrial revolution (IR4.0) and the challenges faced by the country in facing Covid-19 had also changed the P&P landscape at 1,295 TVET institutions in Malaysia.
“The P&P activities can only be implemented effectively by applying the various pedagogical approaches, including cybergogy (virtual learning), peeragogy (peer-based learning) and heutagogy (self-determined learning).
“However, in order to increase its effectiveness, the formulation of the new millennium policy is among the steps that need to be taken by the government,” he told Bernama in response to the government’s plan to empower the education sector including TVET under the 12MP.
Razali said the government also needs to upgrade TVET infrastructure to be more hybrid-friendly and create training facilities based on the Teaching Factory (TF) Model to reduce unnecessary student mobility.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob when tabling the 12MP on Monday said the national education system should be able to produce quality and highly skilled human capital to meet the needs of the industry, including strengthening science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and empowering TVET.
Meanwhile, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) Education and Community Wellbeing Research Centre lecturer Dr Anuar Ahmad said every TVET institution should be transformed by including the latest elements of technology, such as robotics, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) in its courses and programmes so as to achieve the improvement goals underlined in the 12MP.
“TVET is an area that offers many job opportunities to students, but the P&P method should not stay traditional…to meet the needs of the industry, TVET must include latest elements of technology, robotics and AI as these technologies are dominating the future,” he said.
Director of Technical and Engineering Education, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Assoc Prof Madya Dr Aede Hatib Musta’amal @ Jamal, on the other hand, said that in order to ensure that all TVET institutions review their training programme contents or curriculum, the government should also consider setting up a monitoring body to assess its achievements in empowering TVET and STEM.
“The monitoring body should collect all information and feedback on all efforts that had been taken so that less-effective or low-impact projects could be improved or stopped, thus reduce the loss ratio,” he said. – Bernama
