An Assigned Seating Arrangement Based on Students’ Performance: A Critical Review

Classroom learning is one of the best times for students to be engaged in learning. As face-to-face sessions allow students to ask questions directly to the facilitator, a conducive learning environment helps to promote students’ learning. This work in progress attempts to examine the seating arrangement of students in the classroom and its potential to improve students’ learning. It is argued that seating arrangements based on students’ academic record in the previous semester will help to enhance their participation and learning in the classrooms. As a work in progress, data presented in this paper derived from reviews of relevant documents and preliminary observations in classroom sessions. Informal semi structured interviews were also conducted with five students who were involved in the sessions. It can be concluded that students have positive views about the assigned seating arrangements. As the process of collecting data is still ongoing within the next two semesters, the researcher aims to present a solid pedagogical approach to teaching students of the defence university. Keywords: seating arrangement, pedagogy, classroom learning, National Defence University of Malaysi

New Technologies and Leadership Training

e-Learning and simulations are amongst new technologies that receive both praises and criticisms. Because of their potential, many educational institutions are attracted to implement and use them. On the other hand, because of their costs, many academics are sceptical about these new tools. Apart from the costs, many scholars argue about the effectiveness of e-learning and simulations in improving students’ grades. Actually, there is no guarantee that any one learning and teaching tool could help students perform better academically. That is why it is always a wise decision to blend the teaching and learning approaches

Digitising a Learning Activity: Challenges and Opportunities

[EN] As the world faces the new landcape in teaching and learning due to COVID-19, the pandemic, the strategies and approaches use for teaching and learning must ensure that no one students are not without digital resources. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities faced by the researcher and her students when a learning activity previously implemented in face-to-face sessions was transferred into an online learning environment. The learning activity, known as Work-the-Walk (WTW), is a transformative learning activity designed by the researcher, and the researcher has filed for a copyright of WTW. The objectives of this paper are to identify the challenges and opportunities raised by transferring WTW to a digital format, and ultimately to suggest the best ways to make the transition from a physical learning activity to a digital format effectively. Qualitative approach to research was used to obtain data for analysis and discussion. Preliminary findings suggest that the Digital WTW (D-WTW) present two main challenges and two main opportunities for both the researcher and students. Given this, the education providers must be willing to encourage the educators to provide various approaches to teaching and learning, as well as to promote experiments with various existing learning strategies used in face-to-face sessions, and to transfer them to be used in an online learning environment.Juhary, J. (2021). Digitising a Learning Activity: Challenges and Opportunities. En 7th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'21). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 837-845. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd21.2021.12829OCS83784

CONSTRUCTIVISM: THE ROOTS OF MILITARY PEDAGOGY?

This concept paper originates from a bigger documentation, and it attempts to examine the importance of constructivism in building intellectual leaders of characters in Malaysia. It analyses the history and evolution of constructivism. Various theories of learning have been considered but constructivism is imperative as it provides strong theoretical as well as pedagogical links to various methods to teaching and learning. Due to the nature of this paper, it adopts content analysis as its methodological approach. It is found that constructivism offers learning and training principles that suit a military learning environment, referred to by scholars in European countries as military pedagogy. This is because all criteria that are critical for building ‘the guardians’ of a nation, who must be intellectual leaders of characters, such as meaningful classroom engagement, higher order thinking skills, and collaboration, derive from constructivism

Emergency Remote Teaching during COVID-19 Pandemic: Roles of Educators in Malaysia

This chapter responds to the needs of educators in preparing to teach online fully due to the pandemic, COVID-19. This scenario becomes the new normal in the teaching and learning process during the COVID-19 pandemic. The main objective of this chapter is to investigate the roles of educators in one public higher learning institution in Malaysia during emergency remote teaching due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Emergency remote teaching is argued to be the answer to the sudden change from face-to-face teaching to a fully online teaching environment. Data for this chapter were collected through an online survey distributed to potential respondents. Adopting a case study and quantitative approach to research, descriptive and inferential statistical analysis were conducted and presented. Preliminary findings suggest two key challenges. Firstly, educators were ready to embark on transformative emergency remote teaching. Nonetheless, they were not sure of the differences between emergency remote teaching and online teaching; these two have different pedagogical approaches. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, educators were able to use appropriate platforms and applications during the pandemic; however, they did not have ample time to study other platforms and applications. By this, the author argues that some educators have various options to choose from but may lack the knowledge and understanding on how these options work best. In accepting the new normal in teaching and learning, educators must be open to new and creative strategies to engage students during 100 percent online learning

Flipped Classroom at the Defence University

[EN] Flipped classroom is not a new concept in education. Students are expected to be well-prepared before coming to face-to-face sessions since they have to read/watch/listen to the lectures through the learning management system (LMS) or an e-learning portal before coming to the classes. What traditionally was practised is that students were given lectures during face-to-face sessions. Now, the lectures are online, and only activities to enhance students’ understanding will take place during face-to-face sessions. The concept is now being implemented successfully in some higher learning institutions in Malaysia, including Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang; Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Sabah; and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Selangor. In fact, the emphasis is given by the Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia for all higher learning institutions to incorporate the use of technology in teaching and learning. Given this, the National Defence University of Malaysia (NDUM) must also be prepared to rise to this challenge. This research becomes the main study on the use of flipped classroom at the NDUMhttp://ocs.editorial.upv.es/index.php/HEAD/HEAD18Juhary, J.; Amir, AF. (2018). Flipped Classroom at the Defence University. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 827-835. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD18.2018.8093OCS82783

Revision Through Twitter: Do Tweets Affect Students’ Performance?

Twitter is one of the free microbloggings available today. Created in 2006, Twitter has about 500 million registered users worldwide. Many scholars have been debating over the use of Twitter in teaching and learning. This brief research paper aims to look at Twitter as a source for revision for a course offered at the Defence University in Kuala Lumpur. The assumption is that the students are able to score a higher grade when Twitter is used as a revision tool. 32 students participated in this study and tweets were used to support students during their revision period before the second test and the final examination. Data were analysed based on the results of Test 1 (without Twitter as a revision tool) and Test 2, where comparisons were made to see whether there is a change in the students’ results. Further, the tweets sent to/shared with students and the retweets shared by students were also examined. A survey was also conducted to explore the respondents’ thoughts on using Twitter as a revision tool. Preliminary findings suggest that the students had greatly benefitted when Twitter is used as a revision tool. This is because the results of Test 2 show that all students had an increase in the test result. The results of the survey also indicate that students were positive about using Twitter as a revision tool. Although it cannot be conclusively determined whether Twitter was the only factor that contributed to the increase of students’ results in Test 2, this paper will highlight how Twitter can be used as an effective revision tool

The Challenges in Developing E-Content

Malaysia is considered an active key player in information communication technologies (ICTs) especially in education. In fact, in the National Higher Education Strategic Plan, one of the Critical Agenda Projects (CAPs) of the Minister of Higher Education is e-learning. It goes without saying that all higher learning providers in Malaysia must be prepared to provide state-of-the-art facilities for the students. One critical aspect of e-learning is the quality and quantity of the content, or what will be referred by many scholars as e-content. This paper attempts to identify the challenges of content development for e-learning practice at the National Defence University of Malaysia (NDUM). It is crucial to investigate this issue since the university just purchased its Learning Management System (LMS). It is expected that resistance will be present as the academics at the defence university is a mixture of junior and senior lecturers, as well as civilian and military lecturers; and some of these academics have been teaching without the assistance of e-learning. In so doing, the methodology of this paper will mainly be content analysis of various reports, governmental documents, as well as semi-structured interviews with lecturers at the NDUM. As this paper acts as a preliminary investigation into the issue of e-content at the university, only seven lecturers were interviewed. Initial findings suggest that there are basically five challenges of developing e-content at the NDUM. These include the lack of ICT and e-learning policy that can provide guidelines to academics; the uncertainty of ownership for e-learning initiatives; the lack of understanding of the roles of e-learning; the lack of awareness on e-learning; and the difficulties to develop military based content due to confidentiality issues. Two possible solutions for these challenges are also examined which take into consideration the urgent need to set up an e-Learning Unit and to provide series of workshops and seminars of teaching with technology, or relevant courses. It is found that in the effort to give students the exposure to and experience of e-learning, the first step in the implementation phase, which is to develop e-content, has alerted the university of the various fundamental challenges that need to be addressed accordingly