How visionary planning can help management to deal with the new technology-based changes: A case study of an Open University in Malaysia

Vision plays an important role in leadership and strategic planning for all organizations including education. In this regards planning vision is the management’s key task and responsibility. In managing the change process, working on vision not only means examining and re-examining the strategic planning for the organization but also making explicit to management the purpose for the change. Consequently, the importance of the vision and planning would be more critical when an organization is going through the new technology-based changes. This paper which is the result of a PhD research study focuses on “vision “as one of the main component of change management. Therefore, in order to see the different aspect of visionary planning in situation of educational change, four main strategies of management including planning, organizing, guiding, and monitoring have been examined. From the data analysis it was found that in the context of technology-based change or systemic change that affects all the levels and aspects of the organization, vision and strategic planning play as the two key prerequisites for the success of the change. The results of in-depth analysis of “vision” as the key theme of this study are presented in this paper

Factors contributing students’ creativity

The purpose of this study was to determine the factors which could foster and enhance students’ creativity in three research universities in Malaysia. The data collected from 520 postgraduate students. Correlation analysis was employed to analyze data. Findings of this study indicated that three factors such as intrinsic motivation, psychological empowerment, and support for innovation contribute significantly to the development of students’ creativity. It is suggested that universities should create a supportive environment, assist students’ psychological empowerment and develop an innovative culture in order to enhance students’ creative thinking

Factors affecting use of e-learning platform (SPeCTRUM) among University students in Malaysia

Guided by the current need in equipping young minds with the 21st century skills, integration of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in education has changed the way of teaching and learning takes place in educational institutions. The need of fast delivery of knowledge and information, whenever and wherever, has been the catalyst to the growth of e-learning worldwide. In Malaysia, e-learning has been pioneered by the private universities and has been adopted in most universities ever since. In the setting of a research university in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia , a quantitative design was conducted to investigate the factors affecting the usage of e-Learning platform so called SPeCTRUM by the students. Total of 110 respondents consist of undergraduate and postgraduate students from Faculty of Education have been selected randomly to participate in this research. Findings indicate that the co-participatory activities are one the main factors in the motivation of using SPeCTRUM. It was also found that demographic factors of the participants also played a key role in the rate of usage for the e-learning platform

Factors affecting strategic instructional leadership practices of school principals: Teachers’ perception

Instructional leadership is an important aspect of school principals. The roles of instructional leader in an educational organization are setting clear goals, managing curriculum, monitoring lesson plans, allocating resources and evaluating teachers regularly to promote student learning and growth. To improve the quality of an educational organization, an instructional leader should play his /her role and responsibility efficiently and effectively. The main purpose of this study was to identify the factors affecting instructional leadership practices of school principals. A quantitative method was used to collect the data. Accordingly, survey questionnaire was used as the main instrument to collect the data from the Youth Skills Training Institution randomly. The sample consisted of 100 teachers who are currently teaching technical and non-technical subjects in the training institution. Four domains were used as factors affecting the instructional practices, which are professional leadership, shared mission and clear goals, continued monitor of teacher progress and professional growth of the teachers. Findings shows that the four domain factors were really affect the instructional leadership practices. The findings of this study can be beneficial for policy and decision makers in the Ministry of Education, school management and administration as well as teachers

Online counseling using email: a qualitative study

Despite numerous studies in increasingly popular online mental health service, the nature of the relationship between online counselors and their clients, particularly in the email modality, deserves more attention. To enhance the knowledge in this area, this study was conducted to explore whether the online counseling relationship could be developed using email communication. Six qualified counselors and 59 clients volunteered to participate in the study. Using a qualitative approach, we collected data from two focus groups, individual interviews with participating counselors, 206 email interactions, and counselors' journals. To identify themes, we employed a grounded theory method. The emergent themes suggest that counselors describe the e-counseling relationship as having the following five features: initial establishment of a virtual relationship, structuring, text reinforcement, the development of a text relationship, and termination of the process. Each feature reflects a different level of relationship and different characteristics. Implications for future studies are also discussed

A GOA-Optimized Visible Light Communication System For Indoor High-Precision 3-D Positioning Service

Emerging indoor visible light communication and positioning (VLCP) technology is placed among those of recent hot topics as it is capable of declaring the spatial location of objects, providing users with highly accurate positioning coordinates in 3-D with side benefits e.g., no RF interference generation, low cost, and minimized hardware. The current demand for multiple applications in various fields has called for the development of a robust, accurate, and optimized device that leverages the capabilities of VLCP technology. This system is of particular interest as it promises to deliver reliable results for numerous applications. In this paper, the design procedure of high precision indoor 3-D VLCP system is defined as an optimization problem which is solved by utilizing metaheuristic algorithms

Experimental demonstration of critical coupling of whispering gallery mode cavities on Bloch surface wave platform

We experimentally demonstrate critical coupling of whispering gallery mode (WGM) disk resonators implemented on a Bloch surface wave platform using scanning near-field optical microscopy. The studied structure is a 60 nm thick TiO 2 TiO2 WGM disk cavity (radius of 100 μm) operating within the C-band telecommunication wavelength. An extinction ratio of 26 dB and a quality factor of 2200 are measured. Such a high extinction ratio verifies the critical coupling of the WGM resonator. This result paves the way to planar optical signal processing devices based on the proposed geometry, for which a critical coupling condition is a guarantee of optimum performance