Mutterings on education and other issues
NATIONAL SURVEY-THE
MALAYSIA HIGHER EDUCATION BLUEPRINT (MHEB) 2026-2035
The Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) is conducting a
national survey, inviting feedback from the public on the proposed Blueprint on
Higher Education.
Information on the survey can be got from https://www.mohe.gov.my/en/broadcast/banner/national-survey-the-malaysia-higher-education-blueprint-mheb-2026-2035?highlight=WyJibHVlcHJpbnQiXQ==
Please look and respond if you are interested in
our higher education.
Training staff and students on the use of AI tools must be part of any institutional policy that is implemented to deal with the challenges of the new technology.
In this paper, we describe a course developed by senior academics titled Knowledge and Learning in the Age of Chat GPT. The course deals with fundamental questions about knowledge, its creation, verification and application, especially in an educational context.
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT begin to encroach into the realms of knowledge production, it becomes important that students and even teachers have a clearer understanding of how universities and colleges create, validate, and transmit knowledge. Rather than worry about how ChatGPT will undermine the integrity of educational processes, HE institutions must bring the technology to heel as simply another source of information that must be tested and verified like any other source.
More than ever before, HE institutions must forge an environment where all knowledge is subject to critical evaluation and students are given a more explicit understanding of knowledge creation and validation. Students must be taught that knowledge is fragile and vulnerable to manipulations and biases. With that realisation, and equipped with critical and analytical skills, students will be able to evaluate the output of AI technologies and make informed decisions on how to use and apply the information generated by AI tools.
HE institutions must also examine how AI can beneficially serve educational processes. For instance, AI has the potential to liberate education from the control of external agents like the media, governments and politicians or a particular perspective or set of beliefs. Tools like ChatGPT can provide learners with an immediate alternative view of the knowledge that is officially transmitted.
Overall, the course equips students and staff with the necessary skills to ethically navigate and apply the opportunities and challenges that AI technologies bring to the realm of education.
Ideally, the course should be taught over two full days. However, a shortened version can be delivered in one day.
Welcome, and introduction to the course.
A brief overview of the topics to be covered.
Explanation of how ChatGPT works on large data sets.
Examples of how ChatGPT can be used to extract knowledge from text.
Distinguish ChatGPT from information on the Internet.
Discussion of the advantages and limitations of this technology.
Ethical issues arising from the use of ChatGPT.
Personalized and self-learning.
Online tutoring and mentoring.
Automated grading of exams and assignments.
Translation, question answering, summarizing.
Literature search.
Curriculum development.
Generating course materials.
Improving accessibility to higher education, generally and for special needs students.
Originality and plagiarism.
The importance of credibility and accuracy of knowledge and the role of the university in that process.
Importance of knowledge in making informed decisions, solving problems, and advancing knowledge.
Traditional methods of knowledge validation - peer review, fact-checking, citation analysis, and expert opinion.
Challenges in validating online information and information produced by AI tools.
Discussion of the hierarchies of knowledge, from data to information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom
Explanation of how these levels build upon one another and contribute to deeper insights.
Meaning of knowledge.
Different types of knowledge.
Overview of different knowledge systems and how they have created knowledge in the past.
Examples of how indigenous knowledge, religious knowledge, and scientific.
Different approaches and perspectives in knowledge systems.
The hierarchy of cognitive skills.
ChatGPT and the hierarchy of cognitive skills.
Explanation of Bloom's Taxonomy and its six levels of learning: remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating, and creating
Discussion of how different types of questions and learning activities can promote higher-order thinking skills.
Thinking tools to evaluate information/knowledge.
Evaluation of sources.
Analysis of biases.
Application of logical reasoning.
Identifying logical fallacies.
External references.
Ethical implications
Explanation of the limitations of ChatGPT and other similar technologies, including the possibility of biased or flawed knowledge.
Discussion of the importance of critical thinking skills in evaluating knowledge from these sources.
AI technology may seem to make learning more exciting but the excitement must be tempered with vigilance in ensuring the accuracy and quality of information.
© Espact Sdn. Bhd.
By Dr Hazman Shah Abdullah*
Employability is the primary mantra of today’s higher
education institutions. For some, it is the raison d’etre, especially those who
depend solely on students for their income and the primary attraction of their
offerings is jobs, good jobs, and high-income jobs. The written purpose,
philosophy, credos, principles, and values which adorn the halls of the
institution and in their strategic documents fade when you really listen to the
voices on the campus. It will be loud, pervasive, repeated, systematic, blunt,
and blithe.
The primacy of employability of course places the needs of employers
at the centre of the orbit of curriculum, teaching, learning, assessment,
services etc. Regulators, quality assurance bodies, university management,
ranking bodies etc. make this point palatably stakeholder engagement. Many
faculties are still refusing to admit to this and fighting it in whichever way
they can. I have urged them to be open but not reverential to the employers and
the haloed practitioners. Challenge their orthodoxies for proof of relevance
and scale of need. What do employers want and care about? Do they want more of
the same? More than a decade ago, there was a European study which asked
students, faculty and employers, to rank the different generic aspects of a
bachelor's or cycle 1 programme as they call it under the Bologna Convention.
One area where there was a visible difference was academic research. Faculty
ranked this very highly but not students and employers. The European
universities have not thrown formal research out of their curriculum because it’s
the 2nd pillar of their mission. But tactically, you can always dismiss a study
or findings that run counter to your own beliefs or interests with a million little
arguments. Faculty members are trained in this art and science - how to
challenge the credibility of facts or knowledge. We call it epistemology - the
science of confirming good science or knowledge. They may not be as good at
this as the policy-level civil servants who tend to accept their own findings
and ignore the rest.
Employers do care about technical knowledge - the value a
graduate brings to their organisation.
They want specialists but not a large army of them. What they want are non-technical skills aka
soft skills in copious amounts in all specialists but what they mean by it is
not exactly what you find in textbooks. Leadership (less instruction, more
independence), interpersonal skills (communicate with empathy and know your
place as per company culture), resilience (able to take a lot of crap from
peers, employers and customers), teamwork (play your part for the betterment of
the company), problem-solving (satisfy the customers preferably with no cost to
the employer), critical thinking (think hard and deep but always be mindful of
the power and politics of the place), adaptable (do whatever is wanted of you),
rapid and continuous learning (learn on your own and do it fast).
Universities are and have been good at teaching technical
skills. Engineering science, medical science, design science, social science,
management science, information science etc. are what the faculties are
qualified to do and can potentially do well. When it comes to soft skills -
hmmm, it is not something the faculties were taught or trained or qualified to
do. But they try because it is part of the programme's learning outcomes.
Seriously, the opportunity for developing soft skills is not always a planned
one. In fact, many planned interventions are hopelessly ineffective. It is
serendipity - chance learning. This seems to flourish in all universities but
especially in badly managed universities!
Let us take a measure of what typically happens in a bachelor’s
programme in developing soft skills. Communications skills - make repeated
presentations (mastery of PowerPoint and not necessarily point making without
fancy aids), interpersonal skills (discussions within groups - actually
communication with familiar faces or friends), adaptability (live with class
cancellations due to lecturers attending important meetings, and cancel your
weekend life or in rare occasions a pandemic breaks and life changes radically!
- serendipity), resilience (tolerate crap from your university and lecturers
but this is not designed. It is serendipity.), leadership (if your group
assignment is not making progress, step in and take over - serendipity ),
teamwork (letting all group members including supervisors to take the same
credit for work they did not contribute directly. It is plagiarism - undeserved
credit. Lifelong learning (develop loyalty to further studies at the university).
It is peripherally about searching endlessly and aimlessly on Google for ideas,
references, assignments, and a desire to know more and outside the scope of the
programme), problem-solving (the only real problem solving is solving the
conflicts with your timetable and
managing time and academic overload - serendipity), critical thinking (is asking searching
questions in a case study but not about the curriculum, delivery, fees policy,
lecturers’ conduct, university or public policies - it’s often about
politically correct thinking but is it thanking!), ethics and professionalism
(knowing the rules of good conduct - not observing the teaching that comes from
the unethical environment of the university and beyond - its harmless classroom
ethics) and digital skills (LMS use, troubleshooting in videoconferencing
sessions, have FB, IG and WhatsApp, PowerPoint,
Word and Excel in that order)
So much of soft skills are serendipitously acquired. Bad
universities, ironically, create more opportunities provided you have good
students! Good universities might inadvertently remove this serendipitous
learning!
*Dr Hazman Shah Abdullah was a Professor of Administrative Sciences at Universiti Teknologi MARA until his retirement in 2018. During his tenure at the university, he also served as the Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Quality Assurance). Dr Hazman was the Deputy Chief Executive Officer (Quality Assurance) of the Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA) from 2015 until 2018 and continues to serve as a quality assurance expert for MQA.
Information is shoved at us daily from every direction, unceasingly. From the popular media, from the incessant messages that are pumped into our phones every minute, or more seriously, from the information that comes in the form of laws and policies that bind and restrict us. To submit to the barrage of information without critically examining it is a sure way to surrender our freedom. Critical thinking skills have become survival skills in the face of the information onslaught.
Critical thinking skills will help us maintain our freedoms,
which is sufficient reason to acquire those skills. But it will do more. It
will help us to deal with information more effectively and to innovate and
create new ideas from the knowledge we extract from the information. Critical
thinking will help us become more effective learners who can build on the large
amount of knowledge that is being unleashed by the information.
Critical thinking is important not only in educational or
professional contexts but as a living skill. It is an indispensable skill to understand
and analyze information and make important decisions in our lives. Never in our
history have we encountered information as today. Information technology will multiply
the amount exponentially every few days. Much of that information is not
abstract or detached from our daily lives. It affects the decisions and the
choices we make.
In designing this course, we have taken into consideration
the cultural traditions in this country that tend not to support critical thinking
and regard a critical approach as being rude or disobedient. Our education
system has contributed to this by encouraging rote learning and rewarding the
regurgitation of information without critical analysis. Unfortunately, even in
higher education, there is very little encouragement to critically analyze what
is being taught. Only in a few institutions or programs is critical thinking taught
as an independent subject or as part of the syllabus of any subject.
School teachers we have spoken to tend to think that
critical thinking is a difficult skill to teach. Many of them believe that
students are not ready to absorb such skills and must be content with obtaining
knowledge that is found in the textbooks and formalized through syllabuses. Many
have also alluded to the fact that critical thinking can only be taught after
the learner has had a sufficient command of the knowledge and It is the role of
teachers to equip students with the knowledge. What also emerged from our
discussions is a reluctance amongst teachers, brought upon by fear of official
retribution, to introduce any form of critical approach to education. Control
and conformity and rigid adherence to the status quo seem to be the unalterable
canons of education. Critical and creative thinking are aspirations stated in the
Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025. A new curriculum has been proposed that
will add these elements to the education meted out in schools. To make that happen,
there has to be a reorientation of the attitudes of not only the teachers but
the whole bureaucracy of education and of those in government, making policies
on education. One thing that must cease is the punishment of individuals for
artistic and literary expression. We have become a society with increasingly
thin skin. Criticism has been criminalized.
Our institutions of higher education are no better. They are
highly regulated, and contrary to the official rhetoric, the education provided
in universities and colleges is not student-centered. Rigid adherence to
outdated prescribed syllabuses does not cater to student needs. Dissemination
of book-based knowledge is the main objective of higher education. As in
primary and secondary education, tertiary teachers also believe that students are
not ready to engage in any critical examination until they are sufficiently
apprised of the knowledge that is imparted at the different levels of higher
education. The containment of education in the classrooms is reinforced by laws
that restrict the academic freedom of the professoriate. We cite only one set
of such laws – the laws regulating university staff discipline that prohibit any
form of criticism of the government or its policies and the university and its
policies.
This course is driven by the belief that a disposition to critical
thinking will benefit both the individual so disposed and the nation ultimately.
A disposition to examine everything critically will increase creativity and
productivity, whether individually, in groups, or in the workplace.
Course Outline
1. What is meant by critical thinking?
2. Why teach/learn critical thinking?
3. Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Skills.
4. The origins of critical thinking – in philosophy, in psychology, in education.
5. Example of how knowledge developed through critical thinking.
6. Dispositions, attributes, and behaviour that support critical thinking.
7. Critical thinking tools
8. Knowledge
9. How emotions affect thinking
10. Imagination as the mental projection of possibilities which transcend time and space and offer what could be rather than what is.
The problem first reported more than
two months ago about students from a university being stranded without
accredited qualifications is still festering with no real solutions offered. No
one in authority seems to realize the urgent need to relieve the hardships
caused to the students involved. Typically, no official from any of the
relevant ministries and agencies have stepped forward to help the students
concerned. These students would have chosen to study in Malaysia not least
because of official assurances given about the reliability of our higher
education system on the internet and elsewhere. See, for example, educationmalaysia.gov.,
which is the official portal extolling Malaysian Higher Education to the world.
This issue over accreditation is a
debacle that would not have happened if government regulators and owners of
private universities understood better their responsibilities to students.
Great sacrifices are made by parents and students in time and money to receive
a university-level education. There are also the other costs that tend to be
ignored - social and emotional, especially when students travel from afar from
their home countries to study in Malaysia. They come here because of the
promises made by our government and our higher education institutions. There is
a moral obligation that neither of these parties has so far responded to.
The reasons for the students’
predicament lie first on those who manage the institution involved, and
secondly, on badly drafted laws that govern the approval and accreditation of
courses offered by private universities and colleges. Nevertheless, given the
enormity of the problem, regulators cannot sit back as spectators hoping for
things to resolve themselves. There are means available to them to break the present
impasse and they must take them to do so immediately.
Approval of courses conducted in
private universities and colleges are regulated by the Private Higher
Educational Institutions Act 1996 (Act 555). Private Institutions are
prohibited from conducting a course without the prior approval of the Registrar
General of Private Higher Education, a position created by Act 555. Not
complying with the approval requirements will subject institutions to a fine of
up to RM 200,000 and a prison term of 2 years.
The procedure that is now adopted by
the Ministry of Higher Education is that institutions wishing to conduct a new
course must submit the course for evaluation by the Malaysian Qualifications
Agency (MQA). The MQA is an independent body that is not beholden to the
MOHE. The MQA’s standard procedure is to issue a provisional accreditation
certificate to the new course if it complies with the Malaysian Qualifications
Framework and MQA’s guidelines on programme approval. Once provisional
accreditation is given, the Registrar General of MOHE will as a matter of
course, approve the course to be conducted by the applicant institution. The
institution then proceeds to recruit students into the course collecting fees
and other dues from them. Given the present laws and procedures, the students
have no means to realise the danger looming that the course they have paid for
may not be accredited. A course with provisional accreditation will only be
assessed for full accreditation when the first cohort of students in the course
progress to the final year. If the institution fails to secure full
accreditation for the course, the worst of the consequences of that failure
falls on the students. They realize too late that the course they studied and
paid fees for is unaccredited by the only accrediting authority in the country.
Living expenditures incurred in the process are lost. Scholarships are lost.
Time is lost and the employment of the student delayed. Authorities such as
foreign governments, embassies, and high commissions will not validate their
qualifications which is an important requirement for foreign students. The MOHE
is likely to withdraw the approval of the course paying no attention to the
repercussion on students.
The underlying reason for all this is
that penalties imposed by the laws that are passed to protect students’
interests are directed at the courses that flout the laws. The courses lose
their academic value because of the laws. The students are left without any
protection. A course that had secured the approval of the MOHE and which
assured students of its standing is suddenly found to be worthless and
unrecognized.
This is a situation that requires
official intervention. Students registering for a course offered by a legally
established institution cannot be forced to gamble with the prospect of the
course being accredited. They are only required to work hard to fulfill the
academic requirements of the course that they have paid for. Most urgently, the
officials must resolve the students’ predicament and return to them the
qualification they had contracted for. Once that is done, they must act against
the institution concerned for any breach of the laws and finally, proceed to
alter the laws as they now stand.
The students concerned may be facing a
situation where the provisional accreditation has been nullified or withdrawn.
Alternatively, the situation may be that the institution concerned failed to
obtain full accreditation. Worse, they may have registered for a course that
unknown to them was not even approved by the MOHE. All three situations leave
no recourse for students to rectify the problem, and it is grossly unfair that
those who were intended to be protected by the laws are the victims of those
same laws. Neither legislation - Act 555 dealing with the approval of courses
nor the MQA Act 2007 regulating the accreditation processes - protect the
interests of students when institutions flout the laws.
Accreditation is only valid from the
date it is given by the MQA, which means that students who have completed their
course may still be left with an unaccredited programme, even if the course is
accredited in the future. The quickest way to deal with the students’
predicament is to look closely at the exemption powers given to the minister by
Act 555 and the MQA Act 2007, or even more expeditiously through a resolution
of the MQA Council. If the authorities are not willing to take this step, the
only other way to resolve the issue is through legislation, which drastic step,
it is suggested, may not be required in this case. The problem is not
intractable. The interests of students are paramount. The reputation of the
country as an educational hub must be protected.
By the Espact Team
I write this in admiration,
respect, and on behalf of my many friends who are still actively carrying out
their duties in private universities and colleges. They have worked against a confusing
background of policies made and not made and policies made only to be changed. My
friends and others have worked hard to discharge their contractual obligations deeply
aware of their moral obligations to their students. During these past 18 months,
they have worked, against the uncertain official policies mentioned earlier and
the ambivalent responses from their institutions. They are all affected by fatigue
created as much by the additional and different kinds of work they are required
to produce in these difficult times, as by the confusion shown by officials in
handling the current situation. The recurring complaints include a lack of institutional
understanding of online processes and flowing from that, an absence of any
useful guidelines issued to staff or students about the academic expectations
in the new forum. General directions are issued to the academics to go online
without anyone monitoring the impact of the online mode of instruction on
teachers or students. Nor are there policies developed in the institution to
align teaching and assessments in the online or an investigation of either
process. There is no mitigation of the traditional chores of academics, but only
the addition of new tasks in the new environment. For example, teachers are
expected to ‘mark’ papers online, but no adjustments are made to the modes of
assessment or time given to the staff to complete the marking. Regular faculty meetings
to discuss the difficulties, if they had been held over the last 18 months
would have helped, some of them say, but there have only been directions to
comply without caring to examine the difficulties of compliance.
It has not helped that many
institutions are in the dark about handling the situation. No one, to my
knowledge, has organized any course to help staff cope with the current situation.
Nor has there been any formal discussion on how the future of higher education
is to be handled. The MOHE and the MQA must take responsibility for these
processes but both agencies have been sitting on their hands. Institutions, hoping
for more effective guidance from them have failed to receive any. Even pleas
for help made to individuals have also brought little results.
I think we must face the prospect
that the processes of higher education that we have grown up with are no longer
sustainable in an environment that has been violently altered by the pandemic.
In law, the concept of force majeure is a disruptive force that is
unforeseen that fundamentally alters the obligations of parties under a
contract. What was agreed to be done in a particular manner based on certain assumptions
can no longer be done in that agreed manner because of unforeseen disruptions
of those assumptions. When the Suez Canal was closed in the 1950s because of
hostilities along the canal, shippers’ obligation to deliver cargo within a
stipulated time estimated on the assumption that carriage will be through the
canal, could no longer hold. Nevertheless, the carriage had to be completed,
even if it meant that the carriers would have to take the longer route around
the Cape of Good Hope.
Higher education regulators and providers
must take a different route in delivering higher education. However, unlike the
shippers in the Suez Canal situation, the hope for higher education may not lie
in a longer route but a shorter one. This is a time to rethink higher education
by jettisoning the trash, the debris, the bran, and the banter of courses that
serve no purpose in education at the higher level. Maintain the ballast but
review the cargo. It is time to reassess the number of subjects that are forced
down the gullets of students and the mandated duration of the certificate,
diploma, and degree courses. The suspensions forced on us by the pandemic give
us the respite to think through the future. The city of Wuhan in China built a
makeshift emergency hospital to treat patients infected with the coronavirus in
just 10 days. Makeshift must not be regarded as a derogatory term in times like
this.
We have no choice because, if as
experts say the pandemic will be with us in different degrees for at least another
five years, the future we must worry about is already with us. More productive
and purposeful engagement between regulators, institutions, staff, and students
must start now.
