Taking education to the future (Part 2)

Few months passed, everyone has been busy lecturing.

My former lecturer, now Associate Professor Say Sok Kwan and also the Dean of Faculty at Tunku Abdul Rahman University College (TARUC) proposed that I contribute video lectures to the university’s e-learning platform.

I would be delighted and I came up with a proposal. Tried to gather a few lecturers who would be interested to contribute and finally only managed to get two; one of them is Oviyan and the other is my former student, Gan. Well, sad to say, the project didn’t materialize.

Anyway, that didn’t matter. What really matter is that at least we tried. Most lecturers are not ready for video production yet. I believe e-learning is the way to go in the future!

My acquaintance with Oviyan goes way back to Dec 2013. We also have common students, my P2 and his P4. One day, one of them shared Oviyan’s Youtube videos on my fb wall. I find the videos awesome and at least we have lecturers moving into video production kind of thing. I didn’t know, I thought he was a lecturer elsewhere, probably in UK but it is not as it seems. He has been lecturing in Malaysia and some neighbouring Asean countries for some years; over a decade at least.

We chat over fb messenger and were sharing ideas on e-learning capabilities, video recordings, and many other online facilities available to lecturers. It turned out that he also provides video lectures to his students. His friend is helping him to administer the password access.

At one time, our students even thought I was the friend helping him on the video password access. Honestly, we still think that there is further room for improvement where e-learning is concerned. Nonetheless, the existing platform is considered good enough, only that it takes too much precious time administrating the password access and most lecturers can’t spare their time.

Let’s fast track to sometime during mid-May 2015, Oviyan sent me greetings of “Happy Teacher’s Day.”

Very thoughtful, I thought. We receive plenty of Teacher’s day greetings from students but not many of us send such greetings to our colleagues.

Wait a minute! I suddenly think of him as my colleague when we have never even lectured in the same college before. That set me thinking and I suddenly have a glimpse of the future.