QUALITY AND FLEXIBILITY IN ACCELERATING TVET IN INDONESIA: PRACTICE-BASED IDEAS FROM PRIVATE SECTOR IN AUSTRALIA

Abstraksi

Accelerating skills development in Indonesia has been identified as a priority in nation building. One of the challenges is the need to improve the quality and flexibility of pedagogy in TVET institutions while maintaining student engagement and effective learning. The implementation of Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF) has presented such issues to both government-funded Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutions and privately owned Registered Training Organisations (RTOs) in Australia. Being independent, and having to be financially sustainable, means RTOs have to be entrepreneurial. They have to cater to the learners’ needs who often prefer to have their training completed within the shortest possible time in the most cost-effective manner. This preference can create tension between learners (or clients’) needs with compliance requirements. RTOs accredited under the AQTF, therefore, are compelled to devise strategies in training and assessment that balance quality with flexibility, while maintaining regulatory compliance and striving for financial sustainability. There are success stories in this regard, which may be considered by TVET practitioners in Indonesia in the efforts to expedite skills development amidst the constraints at hand. This paper has three objectives. First, it is intended to share the successful quality and flexibility strategies implemented by two Australian RTOs of distinctively different characteristics. One was a corporate training provider responsible for upskilling more than 3000 supervisors across Australia with transformational leadership competencies within 3 years. The other provided students who had been trained in Asia with assessment toward AQTF qualifications. Their methods of contextualisation that enabled quality and flexibility to work with, rather than against, each other will be presented. The second objective of this paper is to examine how those strategies may or may not be suitable for contextualisation to Indonesian context. Implications of the strategies will be considered. Thirdly, the author’s recent insights to opportunities and challenges in adapting Australian TVET courses to Indonesian setting will be discussed. In the final analysis, it is the aim of this paper to construct ideas of how to increase and expand Indonesians’ participation in international standard training in the country. Higher level of participation leads to enhancing their employability skills and contribution to nation building in the future.