By Saiful Bahri Kamaruddin
Pix Shahiddan Saidi

BANGI, 6 April 2016 – Prof Datuk Dr Mohamed Amin Embi, a a professor of technology-enhanced language learning at the Faculty of Education, The National University of Malaysia (UKM) has done the university proud by winning two prestigious international education awards for distance learning and open online courses.

Prof Amin, who has been a strong advocate and contributor of Open Education Research (OER) in Malaysia and the ASEAN region for more than 15 years, won the 2016 Open Educator Award, a lifetime achievement honour which is a first for the country and the region.

The Director of Centre of Teaching and Learning Technologies started using several platforms for open education in 1996 and in 2011 applied social media to share resources, and presently his work reaches 1.5 million people worldwide.

His most significant contribution is the e-book series known as ‘Web 2.0 Tools in Education Series’ with 14 titles in English and 10 titles in Bahasa Melayu.

“It is important that we change the mindset of teachers so that they can reach more students, which is not easy to do. I have responses from Italy, Germany and Canada praising me because the courses can bring positive results,” he said in an interview with the UKM News Portal today.

All the e-books in this series have widely been used as reference guides in the professional development training at all 20 public universities and some private universities in Malaysia.

Prof Amin, who is Director of Centre Teaching and Learning Technologies at UKM,  has also been honoured with the Open Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Award, a long-distance free-resources method, which he pioneered in Malaysia.

His mantra for MOOC is Rethinking Teaching: Redesigning Learning, and he offered the course for free, and now he has 2,100 professors and lecturers from 90 countries participating.

Prof Amin, who is also UKM Chief Information Officer, said the traditional thinking was that online courses was for theory only, but now the attitude is changing with MOOC.

He envisages a time in the near future when MOOC can be credit-transferred, and that means students have the opportunity to experience a new way to complete a course so they have more choice.