Malaysian Legal Information on the Web

This article identifies and provides a brief description of Malaysian electronic legal information and resources. It guides non-legal and legal information-seekers to find useful legal information and resources on the web. A brief description of the Malaysian legal system and its history is also highlighted to give an understanding of the context of the development of the country’s legal system and its resources

Lifelong Learning Skills: ICT & Information Literacy

One of the primary goals of education is to teach a learner how to learn and how to cope with the challenges in life. In view of that, a course namely Learning Skills for Open And Distance Learners was introduced as a compulsory course to all first semester learners at Open University Malaysia (OUM). The course aims to provide lifelong learning skills which intend to help them in their learning during the university tenure, of which two important components includes basic ICT and information literacy skills. This paper explains the importance of these skills for successful learning, and how learners have perceived their ICT and information literacy skills after following through the said course. A questionnaire was developed and used to gather data from learners. 330 learners responded to the questionnaire that was uploaded in the web. The findings showed that majority of the learners admitted to have successfully acquired basic ICT but, a significant number of learners continue to seek skills in information literacy even after completing the course. (Author's abstract

Malaysian Legal Information on the Web

This article identifies and provides a brief description of Malaysian electronic legal information and resources. It guides non-legal and legal information-seekers to find useful legal information and resources on the web. A brief description of the Malaysian legal system and its history is also highlighted to give an understanding of the context of the development of the country’s legal system and its resources

Modeling of Dynamic Pricing of Energy for a Smart Grid Using a Multi-agent Framework

The use of smart grids is being promoted to address issues such as energy independence, global warming and emergency resilience. A smart grid is a digitized form of the power grid and is comprised of an intelligent monitoring system that keeps track of the two-way digital communications in the system. A multi-agent system is a collection of interacting intelligent agents that can be used in problem solving for systems that are difficult or impossible to be solved by an individual agent. Applications of multi-agent systems can range from transportation, logistics, graphics, networking and mobile technologies to modeling real world scenarios to achieve automatic and dynamic load balancing, pricing, and disaster response. The goal of this project was to design and implement a multi-agent system to model dynamic pricing of electricity in a smart grid, thereby improving the overall efficiency of electricity consumption in a real world scenario. This project was accomplished by devising and implementing a multi-agent system for regulating automatic and dynamic pricing of electricity by monitoring power consumption periods and rising or falling prices accordingly. The system developed has the capability of rising and lowering the prices of electricity based on the availability of electricity from energy sources. This system will depict how much energy the consumers are using and how much it is actually costing them. We believe that the logistics analyzed above will help energy-consumption utilities and consumers to make better energy-efficient decisions

Learner Satisfaction in a Collaborative Online Learning Environment

An investigation of learners’ satisfaction in an online learning environment can lead to improvement in designing of an online course or its task, and gives the course facilitator the opportunity to re-focus computer integrated learning environment. In this paper, five key areas of online learning environments, vis. peer interaction, tutor support, online task, technology support, and knowledge acquired will be examined in order to calibrate learner satisfaction. Learners’ satisfaction for a course called “Learning Skills for Open and Distance Learners” within online discussion forum in Open University Malaysia’s learning management system will be the focus of this study. Research data is collected via questionnaire and learners reflection of their learning in the online forum. It is hope that the model shared in this paper for an effective collaborative online learning, will provide insights to the course facilitators to create an interactive and deep learning environment. (Author's abstract

Does Mobile Learning Foster Self-Directed Learning?

With the ever-evolving educational technology trends, distance learning is now able to provide tremendous opportunities of learning that were barely possible before. Despite that, distance education institutions are still continuing the battle with one of their most challenging issue, which is high learner dropout. There is a notion that learners will be more successful and less prone to dropout when their learning is self-directed (Uba, 1997). Recently, research showed that mobile learning encouraged learners to be self-directed and there was a substantial decline in dropouts (Attewell, Savill-Smith, Douch, 2009). This paper is a further effort to investigate the potential of mobile learning to support self-directed learning and aims to highlight the effect of mobile learning using short messaging services (SMS) on learners’ self-direction for learning. In the study, SMS text messages were sent to mobile phones of science teachers who were undertaking the Bachelor of Teaching Program at Open University Malaysia. Data was collected using survey questionnaire as well as interview method whereby 35 participants responded to the questionnaire and two were interviewed. The assessment of self-directed learning was based on the theories of self-directed learning suggested by Brockett and Hiemstra (1991) and Candy (1991). The findings show how learners exhibited ownership of learning due to mobile learning through their goals and plans for learning, strategies and processes of learning and self-evaluation of their learning. The study also discusses issues that these teachers faced when using mobile technologies for self-directed learning. (Abstract by authors

Investigating the Impact of Self Efficacy and Actively Caring on Safely Behaviour : A Study Among Medical Laboratory Technologist

The main purpose of this study is to examine and gain a better understanding of the relationships between self efficacy and actively caring on safety behaviour. A cross sectional study was carried out among 145 medical laboratory technologists. Data which was gathered through a questionnaire survey which was analyzed using the statistical package for social science (SPSS) software 17.0. The research objectives were answered using the relevant statistical analyses. The results indicated that there is a positive relationship between self efficacy and actively caring on safety behaviour. This study also provided information considered useful for framing future research on safety intervention programmes that focuses on characteristics of individuals. New directions for future theoretical framework development and research are suggested for future research to be more complete and comprehensive

Evaluation of puberty menorrhagia in tertiary care centre

Background: Puberty menorrohagia is real trouble among adolescent girls mostly due to problem in hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis. The objective of the study was to evaluation of causes of puberty menorrhagia in tertiary care hospital.Methods: Present study evaluates 60 adolescent girls of age group 11-19 years attending Gynaecology OPD/IPD with excessive Menstrual bleeding who conform to the Inclusion criteria were recruited for the study in the department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of Deen Dayal Hospital Hari Nagar New Delhi over a period of 1 year (August 2018 to June 2019).Results: Out of 60 patients with puberty menorrohagia 47 had anovulatory DUB, 6 had bleeding disorders, 4 had hypothyroidism and 3 had PCOD.Conclusions: Anovulation caused by immaturity of hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis is the most common cause of puberty menorrhagia