By Saiful Bahri Kamaruddin
Pix  Abd Ra’ai Osman

BANGI, 19 Feb 2016 – Massive changes in tertiaty education are underway and traditional universities should reinvent themselves by using the internet to teach, says a pioneering Australian online educator and computer science lecturer.

In order to stay relevant, universities should hold lectures online, said Assoc Prof Richard Buckland of the University of New South Wales and founder of the highly acclaimed open education start-up Open Learning Australia.

He advised universities to adopt the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) which allow an unlimited number of participants and open access via the web, when  speaking in his public lecture at The National University of Malaysia (UKM) titled Open Education: The New Higher Education Landscape.

“Sometimes there are massive changes that happen rarely. Nobody expected it. In hindsight we can only look back and wonder what if we didn’t get onboard,” said Dr Buckland, whose online computing lectures have had over two million views, making him ‘Australia’s most watched lecturer’.

He regarded MOOCs as a Tsunami which would sweep across higher education all over the world.

“I do see that there is a danger for people who refuse to believe that nothing will change. The internet is a meteor striking the earth,” said Dr Buckland, who is also a Cyber Security consultant.

Accessing MOOCs, he explained, is more than just accessing educational material online.

He said MOOCs are real courses that an unlimited number of students and teachers can view wherever they have fast internet access.

He admitted that he personally did not expect MOOC to take off in such a spectacular manner when he co-founded the start-up OpenLearning.com for MOOC and flipped teaching platform in 2012.

He reminisced that back then even his university management and colleagues were rather sceptical about online learning becoming free.

However, he prescribed to higher education institutions to go ahead and do MOOCs for free, and rely on experience to help other universities to go online.

“In that way, you would have got experience and gained enough reputation to issue certifications for other universities which set up their own systems,” he reasoned.

Dr Buckland was in Malaysia to take part in a series of lectures about innovations in online teaching and learning.