University of Nottingham adopted Professional Competencies in 2017 as one of several methods to promote and support innovation in teaching and learning, in addition to improving graduate quality. The Professional Competencies (PCs) were benchmarked against the 10 skills identified by the World Economic Forum (WEF) for the 21st Century. Despite the importance of these targeted PCs, methods to effectively measure students’ performance in this regard have yet to be developed at the university level. To address this issue, the Teaching and Learning Fund in 2018 University of Nottingham Malaysia (UNM) funded a study to support the development of a Common Assessment Protocol (CAP) for assessing the achievement of PCs.

In summary, the findings show that CAP will act as a social platform ++ where students can (1) input information on their achievements, (2) get it verified and assessed by tutors/mentors/peers and (3) ensure that their achievements are benchmarked to the learning outcomes. Significantly, however, a tool such as CAP will place the responsibility to acquire skills and learning on students, as it should in any successful outcome based education system.

Author Profile(s)
Dr. Rozilini M Fernandez-Chung is the Director of Centre for Academic Partnerships and Engagement (CAPE) at University of Nottingham Malaysia (UNM) and is an Associate Professor in the School of Education. Prior to joining UNM, she was the Vice President (Quality Assurance) at a leading private university and the Director for Standards and Reference, Malaysian Qualifications Agency. She was instrumental in developing the Malaysian Qualifications Framework and other policies, regulations, standards and strategies and continues to do so nationally and internationally. Roz has led more than 150 international audits. Her research interests are policy development, quality assurance and transnational education.