Building the Classroom of the Future

Professor Ts. Dr. Azme bin Khamis, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic and International), Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, gives his take on blended learning and what students and lecturers can expect from UTHM’s digitalisation.

Digital transformation helps us better support and address the needs of our academic community, not only for today but also for years to come. As virtual university is a model that is taking ground worldwide, we are carefully assessing how this approach can facilitate better learning outcomes and drive meaningful experiences amongst our students, teachers, and administrators. In particular, we are looking at virtual university to provide more comprehensive support and resources to our students so that they can feel empowered to do their research work.

Covid presents a unique opportunity as it encourages our educators to think innovatively or even re-think about the essential aspects in the contents of the syllabus and how they relate to learning objectives. Furthermore, educators must also be creative as they consider the various teaching medium available and how they can vary their teaching and learning activities of their courses to cater to the students’ demands of today.

Elsevier provides a range of solutions and customer support resources, which we believe will help our educators and librarians in overcoming the challenges above and support our educators in curriculum design and students in their coursework.

Achieving a Blended Learning Model

Digital learning has been growing in higher education, and the unforeseen circumstances – COVID-19 as a catalyst to push these changes at a higher speed. Based on the current implications and trends, the higher education learning is unlikely to go back to pre-COVID-19 normality and therefore more blended/hybrid learning is foreseen and requires a thoughtful change and transformation in integrating the digital educational technology to the classroom learning in higher education institutions. Furthermore, this evolution is also in line with the future of UTHM in becoming a global technopreneur university by 2030.

A blended learning approach can contribute to holistic learning especially since we are in the endemic phase of COVID-19. With this approach, students can develop self-learning skills when they prepare for their respective classes as guided by their professors. This will also help them to develop important soft skills such as time management, resourcefulness, analytical thinking, and the ability to collaborate.

When it comes to the foundations for Teaching & Learning, librarians help to lay the groundwork and are perceived as education partners to the faculty. Our library has worked closely with Elsevier team to understand more on how ScienceDirect content can help to support critical thinking & information literacy of students. They then jointly approached the faculty to establish curriculum development strategy and direction, which resulted in strong positive outcome.