I started my career as a lecturer with Program Pengajian Diploma (PPD) at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) in Kuala Lumpur since October 2002. During my time at PPD (from October 2002 – December 2005), I have taught many courses for 1st and 2nd year students who were enrolled in the Diploma in Computer Science program. The courses I have taught included DDA1042 (Kemahiran Komputer); DDC1013 (Aplikasi Mikrokomputer); DDC1443 (Aplikasi Komputer); DDZ1523 (Asas Rekabentuk Grafik dalam Multimedia); andDDZ2552 (Asas Animasi dalam Multimedia). Several of the courses used software which includes Microsoft Office application software, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Flash, Adobe Photoshop, and Macromedia Authorware. At the time, I was very much interested in Multimedia software and was excited to teach the students about applying Multimedia in various ways of our lives.

Besides teaching at PPD, I was also teaching part-time students (similar courses at PPD) who were enrolled in the UTM’s School of Professional and Continuing Education (SPACE) programs.  The students were more matured and experienced and it provided me some challenges. I was determined to work harder to become a better lecturer. In addition, my 3 years’ experience as a lecturer at PPD has provided me with the knowledge of how to work with other lecturers, teach college students and conduct fundamental research.

In May 2003- May 2005, I was appointed as one of the e-learning committee member (system analyst) to assist and support PPD lecturers in organizing their online learning course materials on Moodle, a course management system that was suggested by UTM. I have had a positive experience in working with lecturers on a one-to-one basis to assist them with managing their course materials on Moodle.

In January 2006, I traveled to the United States to pursue my PhD. Alhamdulillah, in April 2012, I graduated with a PhD in Instructional Systems from Florida State University (FSU). During my time at FSU, I have worked steadily throughout college gaining valuable experience that equipped me to work at Advanced Informatics School (UTM AIS) with advantages that others may not offer. For example, I have worked with several instructional designers, professors, and college administrators while attending FSU. During this time, I developed excellent organization, communication, and software skills (such as using Adobe Dreamweaver to design and develop faculty personal website, Adobe Flash to create animations and design course modules, Final Cut Pro to create video for promoting FSU’s Center for Global Engagement activities to FSU international students), which are often needed among lecturers and instructional designers.

As a graduate assistant at FSU, I spent two years (August 2007 – December 2009) working at Learning Systems Institute (LSI) to assist instructional designers in designing and developing online and face-to-face content modules for training United States seaport security guards, first responders and other seaport personnel. This was a good opportunity for me to work with subject matter experts within an area that is fairly new to me. Since September 11, 2001, terrorism became an unwanted element among Americans. While tremendous strides have been made in airport security as a result of the subsequent targeted federal funding, the country’s seaports remain vulnerable. Overall, our team managed to design modules for the seaport employees in preparing themselves in case of threats coming through the US seaports. The project was funded by the US Department of Homeland Security for a total of USD$ 6.2 million.
I also have had the chance to work with a distinguished professor in Instructional Systems (Prof. Dr. Robert Reiser) as a graduate teaching assistant where I advised graduate students in preparing instructional materials for their lesson plans for EME5603 (Systematic Instructional Design). I further assisted Prof. Dr. Reiser in evaluating student’s class projects. We used Blackboard to manage learning contents and materials for the class. As an instructional designer, we need to be able to formulate learning objectives and design activities to meet the learning objectives.

Prof. Dr. Reiser had a positive experience in working with me (as a teaching assistant) so he offered me a graduate assistant position to organize and conduct events such as the Annual Instructional Systems Alumni Meeting and the Instructional Systems Awards Night. We ended up working together for 3 years (January 2008 – April 2010). For this event, we invited a total of 30 alumni from all over United States. They were annually invited (usually in Spring semesters) to speak to the Instructional Systems’ students about their work experience (e.g. as a consultant, academia) after graduating from FSU. In the Fall semesters, Dr. Reiser and I would co-edit the IS Newsletter that would be later distributed and mailed out to students, faculty, and alumni in our program.

During my final two years at FSU (August 2009 – March 2012), I worked at Tallahassee Community College (TCC) to assist the Director of Educational Research (Dr. Barbara Gill) in analyzing data that relates to student’s learning performance at the college. I mainly worked on generating data reports from the college’s data warehouse. I assisted her in generating data reports for TCC’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) and analysed data over a 5 year period which consists of college initiatives such as Early Alert program, critical thinking skills and College Success courses. At TCC, I have had the opportunity to use Sharepoint to share files and coordinate data with other staff. I have also been involved in the evaluation of the 2011 Honor’s Program at TCC which includes distributing surveys to students and faculty via Opinio, collecting and analyzing the survey data, and preparing the report. I have also provided support to TCC’s faculty on using Opinio as a survey tool to distribute survey and analyze survey data. Dr. Gill and I also conducted a workshop for instructors teaching College Success to assist them in preparing a better rubric for their class assessment.

In November 2013, I had the opportunity to join Mazur Group at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Harvard University. As a postdoctoral researcher, I was very fortunate to work with Prof. Dr. Eric Mazur, who invented Peer Instruction. Throughout my one year fellowship at Harvard University, I have seen how Peer Instruction has been successfully implemented in the Applied Physics courses (AP50).

At Harvard University, I was also involved with several research projects. These research projects mainly focused on Physics Education research, specifically methods of improving teaching and learning in Applied Physics. Most of the research projects focused on Peer Instruction, Peer Assessment, and Team-based Learning that were associated with the AP50 course. The projects that I was involved with included (1) Formulating Team Assessment, (2) Team Effectiveness Index, (3) Peer Instruction Online Module, (4) AP50b Summary of Keirsey Report, and (5) Team Formation Study.

After graduating from FSU, I was appointed as a lecturer at UTM AIS to continue my service at UTM. UTM AIS has provided me many opportunities to showcase my strengths as an academic staff. In November 2012, I chaired the annual seminar titled Postgraduate Annual Research on Informatics Seminar (PARIS’2012). Approximately, 30 PhD and Master’s students presented their research proposals during the seminar. There were 3 parallel sessions for the seminar including Informatics, Software Engineering, and Information Security. This is an annual event for UTM AIS and in the future, we plan to have students lead in organizing the event.

I was also appointed as the Coordinator for UTM AIS’s Portal & Content since June 2012. In my current role as a coordinator, I lead a team that manages and updates current contents to UTM AIS’s website. At the moment, we are also using Google Analytics to observe the traffic for our website and finding new ways to turn the portal’s visitors into potential customers (students) at UTM AIS.

UTM AIS (under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Azizah Abd. Manaf) has also given me the opportunity to work on the paperwork for the upcoming Master’s program for UTM AIS – Masters of Science (Informatics). Since late 2012, I have assisted Assoc. Prof. Wardah Zainal Abidin in preparing the paperwork for this program. We foresee that the program will be offered and available to students in September 2014. The program will provide opportunities for UTM AIS lecturers to showcase and share their expertise in the areas of Educational Informatics, Health Informatics, Business Informatics, and etc.

Presently, I am working on my research funded by New Academic Staff (NAS) grant. The research is titled “The effects of think-pair-share in promoting active learning assisted with ARS using mobile phone”. This research is enhanced from my dissertation study. Instead of using clickers, my team and I are planning to design an online interactive system that can be used to promote active learning by using think-pair-share in postgraduate classes at UTM AIS.

Currently, I am working as a co-researcher on several other projects that was just approved in early 2013. The research projects include “Activity Recognition Based on Hybrid Signals of Accelerometer, GSM and WiFi on Mobile Phones for Context Aware Computing (Research University Grant – RUG); Optimization of Cellular Automata for Indoor Mobile User Location Determination (Fundamental Research Grant Scheme – FRGS); Lattice Cellular Automata approach for indoor user location determination using IEEE 802.11 Signals (Research University Grant – RUG).
As we are in the digital era, I am looking forward to seeing UTM courses and programmes being offered online as we can attract people globally and provide diversity in our learning community at UTM. There are various ways of teaching online now that there are several software available out there, including Elluminate and Adobe Connect, which can be used to interact with online classmates and lecturers.

UTM is currently going through a comprehensive institutional transformation that plans to promote mindset change and better functioning staff members. This transformation also includes improved delivery systems to transform the university’s current operating models to one that is innovative, entrepreneurial and global, which is currently the tagline that UTM subscribes to. Therefore, I can foresee that there is a need for instructional designers at the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) to assist with providing information, tools, and training to other academic staff for teaching and learning purposes. Instructional designers are can also provide services such as introducing and personalizing teaching methodologies and pedagogical solutions for lecturers in various fields.
My varied experience including my background in academia, involvement in various research projects, instructional design experience, and the combination of working with professors, and college administrators enables me to become a stronger academic staff at UTM AIS, InsyaAllah!

UTM Synergy 4.0

Since July 1, 2018, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) has embarked on a unique history when undertaking the restructuring of its academic entity and witnessing the merger of faculty from 18 to seven. UTM Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Datuk Ir. Dr. Wahid Omar said the restructuring, known as UTM Synergy 4.0 leads the university to have only seven faculties. The UTM Synergy 4.0 has merged several faculties into seven faculties namely the Faculty of Engineering, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, Faculty of Science, Faculty of Built Environment and Surveying, Razak Faculty of Technology and Informatics, Azman Hashim International Business School and Malaysia Japan International Institute of Technology (MJIIT).“ The restructuring process also involved several schools in UTM Kuala Lumpur such as UTM Razak School, UTM Advanced Informatics School (UTM AIS) and UTM Perdana School. These three schools have merged and formed one entity known as the Razak Faculty of Technology and Informatics.

In February 2017, I decided to take a year off from UTM to focus on my passion and skills in Instructional Design. I joined OpenLearning as a Course Design Trainer and Learning Designer. OpenLearning is an online learning platform that goes beyond content delivery to focus on community, connectedness, and student engagement. OpenLearning is a for-profit educational technology institution based in Australia that offers a social online learning platform that can deliver massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Most of my work involves designing and conducting training for OpenLearning clients. As a trainer at OpenLearning, I assessed training needs among OpenLearning users, developed and updated instructor materials, observed and evaluated results of training programs, identified overall effectiveness of programs and made improvements, mentored and guided other instructional designers on presentation & delivery techniques, and planned short and long term goals and objectives of OpenLearning training programs. At OpenLearning, we designed and customized the workshops based on the requirements and needs of clients. We conducted workshops for Full-A-Mark, Polytechnics in Malaysia, Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI), Taylor’s University, and University Malaysia of Computer Science and Engineering (UNIMY). We even conducted one-on-one training as per requests. 

Besides my role as a trainer, I was also a Learning Designer at OpenLearning. I had the opportunity to work with one of the clients, Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI). The course that I designed on OpenLearning platform was Falsafah, Teori dan Dasar Pendidikan Awal Kanak-kanak, which was a part of UPSI Diploma of Early Childhood Education program. 

Overall, it was a great experience working in the industry and I gained a lot of experience while I was there. For that, I am grateful!

Since early 2017, I decided to explore teaching online with Open University Malaysia (OUM). Since then, I have been teaching several online courses which are Human Performance Technology (HMHP 5903), Trends and Issues in Distance Education (HPEI 7053), Current Trends in Higher Education (HPEF 7003), and Current Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology (HMID 6303).

Besides teaching, I also worked on writing scripts and recorded video lectures for the subjects of Human Performance Technology (HMHP 5903) and Trends and Issues in Distance Education (HPEI 7053). Those video lectures are developed for students whom are enrolled in the courses. For each course, there is a series of six videos which lasts for about 10 to 15 minutes and covers most of the important topics.