Blog Archives

EduTech Malaysia 2021

12/6/2020

This is not my first time involvement with EduTech conference series, as I was invited to talk at EduTech conferences for three times already since last year. Next year, there will be another Edutech (Malaysia) conference that will be happening on 24 to 25 February 2021. I had a Zoom meeting with Qian Xin, who wanted me to share contemporary issues on online teaching & learning, especially from the perspective of the Malaysian context. One of the my main points was - to what extend do we (educators) know what lingers in our students' minds when all learning activities and assessments are brought online? All this while, we tend to talk and focus more on what educators should and shouldn't do when they conduct online learning experiences. But do we realize that very little of us dare to dive into our students' ocean of thought and understand their struggle? So, let's hope that Malaysia EduTech will present something from students' very own perspectives this time, and we should learn then on how to modify our current approach! An emic perspective insight will definitely be interesting to help us learn and explore more :)

Thanks Germaine and Qian Xin for inviting me to Malaysia Edutech! Let's hope everything that we plan will be a success. See you in Feb 2021!

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Redesigning a Meaningful Online Learning for Learners

12/6/2020

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I was invited to present a keynote speech for 2020 IEEE Conference on e-Learning, e-Management and e-Services (IC3e2020) that took place on 17th November 2020. Redesigning a Meaningful Online Learning for Learners: Where Do We Start and Where Do We Go? - that was the title of my presentation. Everybody is talking about shifting teaching to online mode but little that we know that the shift needs a planned modification, not only related to the content delivery alone. Rather, it involves more aspects - students' actual needs and capacity (cognitive as well as their technology affordances), learning experiences to suit the objectives, a choreography of activities so as to ensure active learning to take place and not forgotten, the aspect of assessment.

I also highlighted the importance of identifying the root of the problem that is to be addressed by using a performance discrepancy analysis. This is a core approach taken by all instructional designers. Without understanding the actual cause of students' performance, we will never be able to provide them a remedy. Being an educator is not easy huh, but if you love your profession, I bet this process will give you abundance of blissful satisfaction as you know what you are doing, and why you choose to do it :)