Ir. Ts. Dr. Zaki Yamani Zakaria Official Page
School of Chemical & Energy Engineering, Faculty Engineering, UTM
After having our Consortium Meeting UTM level last Thursday (I did not make a post on this because I highlighted the OBE Workshop), today we gathered in a bigger group with our UPM and UTHM counterpart. The meeting commenced at 2.30pm, hosted by Prof. Khairiyah using her Zoom account.
Dr. Farah presented on behalf of UTM’s progressed, which was more on our progress on developing the Code Book etc.
As much as I would target and do my official tasks for today, I failed to do it. I realized I have plenty of pending tasks hanging around my back. But today, the first half of the day was focused on a virtual chess competition that I participated in. It was my first time participating in a virtual chess competition. I felt really nervous and targeted only to win 1 game out of 7 games. It turned out that I managed to won 2 games and I was ranked number 143 out of 163 participants. If I am ranked like this when I was studying long long time ago, I will feel super miserable. But luckily, this is just a chess game and I am very amazed with many the majority of the participants who are very excellent in the Chess game, a strategist game.
Those who are very good in Chess could be from various background. I take for example, my uncle from Kedah. He did not excel academically and he is a trailer / bus driver. But, I never managed to bit him in a chess game. He has his vision, strategic move, manage to create plenty of illusion to make me think differently. My simple conclusion is chess master greatness is not proportional with ones cognitive intelligence.
Late today at 5.30pm, we had this IEM SESIG Committee Meeting to discuss on the KPI and activities to be done this year and next year. This is my first time attending as a committee for this newly form SESIG Com. It’s a smaller team compared to the Protem Committee.
I’m pleased and eager to contribute and this is inline with my passion which is Safety and Engineering Education. It is also constructively aligned with the Safety Champion in Engineering Education (SCEE) under RAE that I joined. I intend to give a talk later next year under SESIG, but I did not mention it in the meeting. It will be regarding Safety Engineering Education.
This is the 3rd day of the OBE Assessment workshop. The first one was reported here and the second day was reported here. I was in charged to take care of the Chemical Engineering Lecturers from UNS, similar as yesterday. The first day I took care of Mechanical Engineering.
In the 1st break up room, we discussed on how to Design Course Activity for Team Working Skill. It’s a quite challenging tasks for them. Throughout the discussion, I realized that their methods or conduct of the Final Plant Design project was very different from what we do in UTM. One significant example is that the Final Design Project team only have 2 students in a team, which I believe and feel not good enough. It should be at least 4 or 5 students in a team, to resemble an authentic situation.
Today is the second day of the OBE Course Assessment under the RAE project. The first day was held yesterday and the 3rd day will be tomorrow. So far the workshop was very good and we can see that the participants were enthusiastic and responded well.
I have been a facilitator for this kind of workshop for few times, I am guessing maybe 3 times already. Being in this workshop makes me learn and relearn every time, whenever I attend. Before this I am not familiar with OBE, but after attending several workshops, I realized that the bring back knowledge differs from one workshop to another workshop. The percentage of knowledge retained will not be that big, but we learned something (around 50%), but upon attending another workshop, the knowledge increased and established a bit more (up to 60%). Then it keeps on increasing and I get better and better.
The knowledge captured (bring back home knowledge) depends on what I am feeling, thinking or experiencing at that time. When the knowledge delivered by the speaker relates to something that I am working on that time, then I will manage to retain it more.
This RAE-Indonesia Workshop: Course Assessment for OBE will take place for 3 days, that is from 24th to 26th August 2021. The Workshop for this time is lead by AP Dr. Yudariah, AP Dr. Nazihah and Prof. Dr. Sharifah Kamilah. The rest of us assisted as organizer and facilitators.
Today, after quite some time not becoming an academic evaluator or examiner, I became one. This time I became the second assessment evaluator for an Iraqi PhD student, Mustafa Jawad under the supervision of Dr. Hajar Alias and Dr. Muhammad Tahir. It was a fruitful session especially for the students as I inquired several important questions that is useful for Mustafa’s research and thesis.
The session commenced at 2.30pm and ended slightly after 4pm. It was definitely morning time zone in Iraq for Mustafa. The unique aspect about Mustafa’s research is that he is doing an experiment and he set up his experiment in his house in Iraq in view of the pandemic.
After the Engineering Education Paper Publication Workshop 2 weeks ago, I managed to spent some time to make some improvement on this paper draft which was written by Dr. Muhd Nazrul Hisham Zainal Zainal Alam and others. I felt a bad that I could not enhance the paper earlier than I was supposed to do, but hey.. Alhamdulillah, it’s finally done and we are working out the further check and enhance the paper.
The workshop session was super beneficial as Prof Maizam who recently retired from UTHM gave us some insight on how to better approach the paper. She has years of engineering education research experiences and I believed in the early days she struggled a lot. I know it because I am also struggling to comprehend Engineering Education teaching and research.
I must say that I truly respect and solute Dr. Nazrul for his marvelous resilient effort in working on this paper. Last year he has written a paper titled “Arduino for Chemical Engineering Students via Game-based Learning” (refer picture above) which was published in AJEE (Vol. 4) – [Paper link] and this year he managed to published in IJET – “Application of Computational Tools to Support Cooperative Learning in Bioreactor Design Course”, (Vol. 16, No. 15) – [Paper Link], a reputable Engineering Education Scopus journal.
I hope his tremendous efforts will be a magnificent example for other engineering lecturers. A very good example indeed.
Today is a kind of Saturday that I take time to relax myself after going through numerous tasks from the past week. We do need some break from time to time. Break the pattern and relax, refresh and rejuvenate.
In actual, the early first half of the day was allocated to monitor the installation of ceiling fan in 3 bedrooms in my house. We revert back to the conventional ceiling fan with its regulator attached at the wall next to the switch. We removed the remote control ceiling fan which was fault prone due to the complexity of motherboards and other electronic components.
Later that afternoon, the Cukoo Service person came in servicing our water dispenser. There goes my day, a lot of domestic management to be dealt with.
The Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS) report has nearly ended. I managed to filled up the progress report. It was not a good progress mainly because I failed to get a masters student to work on the FRGS project despite of countless effort promoting and inviting potential students. I hope and pray that I will get a new student to work on this project soon.
I did not expect the FRGS report to be that detail. It took quite some time to complete all the sections in the online report dashboard. Pheww…
