2021 Day 238 Task – IEM SESIG Committee Meeting

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.

2021 Day 237 Task – RAE-Indonesia Workshop: Course Assessment for OBE – Day 3

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.

2021 Day 236 Task – RAE-Indonesia Workshop: Course Assessment for OBE – Day 2

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.

2021 Day 235 Task – RAE-Indonesia Workshop: Course Assessment for OBE

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.

2021 Day 234 Task – Second Assessment for PhD Student – Mustaffa Jawad

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.

2021 Day 233 Task – ECE Paper Minor Draft Improvement

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.

2021 Day 232 Task – Relax, & Rejuvenate – Fan Installation

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.

2021 Day 230 Task – Preparation and Submission of MyGrant Report

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…

2021 Day 229 Task – Core RCEE2021 Program Meeting

RCEE2021 is almost just around the corner. The theme program has already been decided 3 or 4 months ago but the detail title of the whole program remain undecided yet. I have prepared a draft of title for the program with a little help from some of the committee members. This morning we finally discussed and decided the whole Keynote, Plenary, Special Session and others and I felt relief.

I know I need to learn, grasp and comprehend engineering education as fast as possible after becoming the Director. I am doing my best to learn. It does require time and process to be up there. I appreciate and still need the mentorship of the previous Director and also the support of all fellows and colleagues.

The Big guru, as one of my ex-student said, Richard Felder, who co-authored Elementary of Chemical Processes, a highly referred chemical engineering text book, started his venture into Engineering Education and STEM in his 40s. Now, in his 80s, he is still devoting his time and expertise to solidify engineering education to its best. He’s the top person in the business. Everyone in the industry knows, referred and respected him.

In Syaa Allah, I’ll do my best to learn and relearn.

2021 Day 228 Task – IOP Journal Guide and Morressier

Last week I received an email from IOP. The representative was mentioning about the new tool that was incorporated with IOP which is Morressier. At that time, Morressier was alien to me. I have not heard about it and was not sure what it is capable of.

However, when I attended IRSPBL on last Sunday, I realized that Morressier platform was employed.