By Saiful Bahri Kamaruddin
Pix Ikhwan Hashim

BANGI, 3 May 2016 – Malaysia is top among developing countries and fourth   worldwide for the number of savvy digital mobile device users, says  open education and online learning award-winning professor from The National University of Malaysia (UKM) Prof Dato’ Dr Mohamed Amin Embi.

He said those who were born in the mobile computing era, whom he called ‘Generation Z’, are adept in sharing information over social media and learn new things from the internet.

“If we teach today’s students the way we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow, so educators must have the mind-set of learners and see themselves as architects of the learning experience,” he said at a forum of prominent UKM academics and researchers, here today, which was officiated by Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation ) Prof Datuk Dr Mazlin Mokhtar.

He explained in his lecture titled How Social Media Impacts Research that studies in America showed that students are less likely to retain what they learn if conveyed via passive teaching methods.

He believes that, participatory teaching methods have a much higher retention rate with group discussions at 50%, practice at 75% and teaching others at 90%, compared to lectures with 5% and reading 10%.

Prof Amin said if a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe they should be taught the way they learn, i.e. online.

Prof  Amin recently received two awards from the Open Education Consortium (OEC) at the Open Education Excellence Awards Ceremony in Cracow, Poland last month.

The first was the ‘Individual Educator’s Award’ which he received for his contribution to open education over the last 15 years, while his second was for pioneering  Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in the region.