Hitit İlahiyat Dergisi

Öz

Industrial revolutions have been shaped within the framework of certain driving factors such as mechanization, the use of steam and electricity in machines, and the invention of electronic machines. In the 21st century, which is expressed as industry 4.0, new developments and innovations have emerged in many fields such as industry, technology and education. In parallel to these developments, there have been successive changes in other related issues. In this context, the knowledge, skills and competencies that employer institutions and organizations expect from their employees have also changed, and these are named as 21st century competencies. Many academic and non-academic studies have been conducted on the quality and quantity of these qualifications. In addition, nowadays activities have been carried out for the tools and mechanisms that will ensure the acquisition of these qualifications. One of the activities that come to the fore in this context is quality and accreditation studies in the field of education. One of the organizations operating in the field of accreditation of theology and Islamic sciences programs in Turkey and internationally is the Islamic Sciences Accreditation Agency (IAA). IAA expects the outputs of the programs applying to enter the accreditation process to include the outputs of the IAA, so it expects the program graduates in the process to have the outputs of the IAA, and offers the acquisition of program-specific criteria as a recommendation. At this point, the issue of IAA outputs and program-specific criteria come to the fore whether the assurance of 21st century qualifications for graduates of theology and Islamic sciences program or not. For this reason, in this study, the role of Islamic Sciences Accreditation Agency (IAA) criteria is discussed in the process of gaining the knowledge, skills and competencies expected from individuals in the 21st century to the students of theology and Islamic sciences program. Therefore, in this article, it is aimed to reveal the place and importance of the IAA accreditation process and its criteria in the theology and Islamic sciences program undergraduate students who are in the process of IAA accreditation, in order to have 21st century qualifications. 21st century qualifications and IAA outputs as well as its program-specific criteria constitute the scope of this study since the role of IAA outputs and program-specific criteria in the acquisition of 21st century qualifications is discussed in the study. However, in this process limitations have been made at the point of specifying the 21st century competencies. In this context, the competencies expressed in 9 of 19 studies on competencies were taken as basis. All of the IAA outputs and program-specific criteria are included in the scope. This study is important in terms of showing the value of IAA accreditation at the point of gaining the 21st century qualifications to the graduates of the program who are in the IAA accreditation process, and revealing the assurance dimension of the accreditation process in gaining these qualifications. In the research, qualitative research method was used as a method and case study was used as a tool. Due to the uniqueness of the case, the single case model was preferred. For data collection, open-public documents were used. For this reason, it is seen unnecessary to obtain an ethics committee approval. In this process, initially the scientific study documents dealing with the 21st century competencies and the IAA criteria were examined, and then the obtained data were evaluated. Descriptive method was used in data analysis. Both internal validity elements, such as getting expert opinion; and external ones such as classification, categorization and coding of data were fulfilled. In the study, it has been noted that IAA outputs support most of the 21st century competencies; on the other hand it has been found that IAA program-specific criteria support a significant part of these qualifications. Therefore, it has been concluded that the IAA accreditation process can be a guarantee for the students of theology and Islamic sciences programs to gain these qualifications. It has not yet been determined whether the graduates of the accredited programs have gained these qualifications due to the fact that the IAA accreditation practices have just started and the impact process on the students has spread over the years. In accordance with this purpose, it is recommended to carry out different studies, including the opinions of students, graduates and stakeholders, after a while.