Research-Based Learning in Islamic Higher Education: A Comparative Policy Study of Indonesia and Malaysia

Abstract

Islamic universities in Southeast Asia are expected simultaneously to expand access, to raise research productivity, and to produce graduates capable of independent inquiry, yet these expectations are governed by policy instruments that address research and teaching as separate domains. This article aims to compare how Indonesian and Malaysian higher education policy structures the relationship between research and undergraduate teaching, to identify the mechanisms through which each system does or does not translate institutional research activity into student learning, and to derive design implications for Islamic universities. The study is a qualitative comparative policy analysis employing document analysis of national regulatory and strategic instruments, read through the teaching-research nexus literature, with functional comparison as the organising method; no institutional performance data were collected. The findings indicate that both systems have strengthened research governance considerably while leaving the nexus to institutional discretion, that Indonesian policy provides the stronger structural opening through flexible learning arrangements that permit research to be credited as coursework, that Malaysian policy provides the stronger institutional differentiation through research-university status and outcome-based quality assurance, and that in both systems incentive structures reward research output over research-based teaching. The article concludes that the nexus is weakened less by the absence of research capacity than by the absence of mechanisms translating capacity into curriculum, and recommends crediting supervised inquiry within degree structures, recognising research-based teaching in academic promotion, and embedding inquiry as a programme-level learning outcome.