Free Universal High Quality Education for Sarawakians

Free access to high quality learning resources is something that I believe many of us Sarawakians would never have thought could be real. Today, it's our new weapon for mass education, and great quality.

YouTube EDU and Academic Earth have done well in spreading learning.

This is welcome news for students and families around the world who have had little educational choice in the past, except that provided by the public sector. It is globalisation bringing education to students across the world, shortening the distance between countries and bringing quality lectures to emerging and developed nations.

Given that we are entering into the Web 2.0 era, Google has an opportunity to go further in upsetting status quo. It can do so by launching, in tandem with YouTube EDU, contests and small prizes for students to enrich the core material.

Opportunities for improvement include creating and sharing translations, mini-case studies, transcriptions, and slides to accompany the courses. Winners of such contests can be chosen through a combination of peer voting and expert review to ensure accuracy of the proposed enhancements.

Precedents exist for engaging students from poor communities in creation of eLearning resources. At http://www.openworld.com and http://www.entrepreneurialschools.com, sample YouTube clips and online work-study research projects show what students in extremely impoverished, war-torn areas of the world can do in response to small (USD30) microscholarships, vouchers, and prizes.

Billons of camera phones capable of recording and sharing short video clips are heading to impoverished areas of the world in the next few years.

If YouTube EDU opts to encourage co-creation opportunities for students, a wealth of new eLearning resources may be generated by media-capable students who are now shortchanged by 19th century-style schools.

This may create an grassroots opportunity for new, market-sensitive learning ventures to flourish.

In line with its “Education anywhere and anytime” vision, the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) imparts on students, courses on public health, art, music and various other subjects through mobile phones. IGNOU now serves about 1.8 million students in India and 32 countries abroad through 21 Schools of Studies and an elaborate network of 58 Regional centres, 1804 study centres, and 49 overseas centres.

Looking at the mobile phone penetration in Malaysia, we can think of using the medium to impart education. Education and technology cannot be seen separately. Following IGNOU's steps in spreading learning to rural India, Malaysia can likewise, take education, especially vocational education, to our kampongs through mobile handsets.

IGNOU believes in imparting quality education to the masses. These easily accessible modules would be implemented in collaboration with the Communication and Manufacturing Association of India. The courses are offered through text, video and graphics mode. IGNOU would also provide public health courses on nutrition, public health, AIDS awareness, and many other educational contents. Furthermore, students do not have to pay anything extra for the new service.

YouTube EDU launched, on 26 March 2009, an educational hub “volunteer project sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities”. The site is aggregating videos from dozens of colleges and universities, ranging from lectures to student films to athletic events. Some of this stuff is solid gold (the Stanford and MIT lectures are really good).

Academic Earth is an organization building a platform for video and other educational resources from top universities, think tanks, and conferences. The company has the stated goal of “giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.”

Academic Earth offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface. Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.” The site also features a roster of famous guest lecturers on entrepreneurship and technology including Larry Page, Carol Bartz, Tim Draper, Elon Musk, and Guy Kawasaki.

These aren't radically new ideas. Fora.TV and BigThink both offer intellectual video content online. iTunes U hosts a lot of university content as well. Unlike Big Think, Academic Earth isn’t creating original content, it’s just repurposing existing academic content. And Fora.TV seems to focus more on speeches and public lectures. But Academic Earth has the right plan around providing free course lectures. You can watch an entire semester’s worth of lectures in a few days.

Fellow Sarawakians, you know what to do.

Growing Pains for Greater Gains

PR’s chain of trouble from weak link
Source: The Star Online
By BARADAN KUPPUSAMY

After one year, Pakatan Rakyat’s dilemma is that ‘little brother’ PKR is using by-elections as a way of winnowing unwanted representatives, something that does not sit too well with DAP and PAS.

THE resignation of besieged former Penang Deputy Chief Minister I Mohammad Fairus Khairuddin as Penanti assemblyman has forced yet another by-election.

As it is, voters are already suffering from election fatigue after five straight by-elections since the March 8, 2008 general election.

Like the April 7 Bukit Selambau by-election, the upcoming Penanti by-election was brought about by the resignation of the assemblyman, in this case Fairus at the behest of the party’s top leadership.

PKR de facto leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim is being forced to use by-elections as a way of getting rid of unwanted assemblymen who in one way or another have been an embarrassment to the PKR and the Pakatan Rakyat coalition.

When two PKR assemblymen in Perak were charged with corruption, the party defended and continued to keep them as exco members, a lapse that led to their defection and Pakatan’s subsequent loss of Perak.

PKR learnt quickly from that disaster.

When V. Arumugam, the former Bukit Selambau assemblyman, was caught in an embarrassing “bigamy” scandal, he was ordered to resign to force a by-election which PKR’s S. Manikumar won.

The PKR is taking the same route with Fairus, who resigned as deputy Chief Minister on April 8 following corruption investigation, to ensure that he vacates the seat for a more credible candidate.

In the case of the Bukit Lanjan state seat in Selangor, PKR has decided to keep Elizabeth Wong after she had resigned on Feb 17 over controversial pictures of her that surfaced on the Internet.

While Wong, who is well qualified for her job, is seen as a victim of blackmail, Arumugam and Fairus are looked upon as weak and ineffective and having compromised themselves and the party.

Nevertheless, using by-elections as a way to “clean up” the PKR can only work so far.

The danger is that an election fatigued public, worried that the politicking would drag the country down at a time of mounting economic woes, could hand PKR a defeat.

The fear of loss and election fatigue are reasons why the DAP and PAS were reluctant to engineer another by-election to save face for the PKR.

But the die is cast now and they have to toe the line taken by Pakatan supremo Anwar and prepare for yet another by-election.

The Pakatan dilemma is that PKR is the weak link in the year-old coalition.

While PAS and the DAP are able to hold on to their elected representatives and ensure compliance, the PKR is often hit by one scandal after another.

The reason is that the PKR, being the new kid on the block, is still finding its feet and shedding unwanted baggage accumulated during the reformasi era.

Engineered by-elections is also a tactic the PKR likes because it keeps their supporters bound together and in a fighting mood – a siege mentality going back to the reformasi era when the party was under constant attack.

In the case of the older and wiser DAP and PAS, their priorities are to better administer the states under their charge, deliver on the election promises and prepare for the long haul.

For PKR, the priority is immediate and bound with the future of Anwar and his dream to be Prime Minister.

In Penang, Anwar’s dilemma is that after Fairus, the two remaining Malay PKR assemblymen – executive councillor and Batu Maung assemblyman Abdul Malik Abdul Kassim and Sungai Bakap assemblyman Maktar Shapee – are seen as unacceptable for the Deputy Chief Minister 1 post.

Abdul Malik is said to be the main force behind Fairus’ resignation and giving him the post would be seen as rewarding political backstabbing, says a national PKR leader.

“Besides he is not on good terms with Penang PKR chief Datuk Zahrin Mohd Hashim,” said the leader.

The issue is further complicated as Zahrin, who is Bayan Baru MP, wants Fairus’ job.

The other candidate Maktar is “simply not cut out for the job,” say top PKR leaders.

As in Arumugam’s case, Anwar has decided to resolve the issue by forcing a by-election. He hopes to field a more credible Malay candidate, win and move on.

This method is tricky not just because of election fatigue but also because PKR, being a multi-racial party, has other options.

It can make a temporary sacrifice and pick a non-Malay PKR assemblyman as deputy Chief Minister 1 until a more credible candidate is fielded in the next general election.

Deputy Chief Minister 2 Dr P. Ramasamy has repeatedly said that “he represents all voters, not just Indians”.

This kind of thinking is real multi-racialism in which the PKR could show the way.

But now that a by-election is inevitable, voters, whether they like it or not, will be subjected to another bout of politicking at a time when the national focus should be on the mounting economic woes.

Our Failed Education System

The Malaysian education system, evidently, has been deteriorating over the past 20 years. While exam scores have been on the uptrend, the quality of college and university graduates entering the job market has been on the decline. The number of university graduates that are unable to find jobs is an alarm signalling the decline in quality. A research done by a major management consulting firm found that only 11% of Malaysian graduates are employable by multinational companies. Most common weaknesses of our graduates include lack of communication skills, poor critical thinking and problem-solving skills, poor attitude towards work and possess weak ethics and integrity.

There has been significant money and effort spent to improve the Malaysian education system, such as the Malaysian Smart Schools project, the roll out of the National Education Blueprint and the implementation of the Cluster Schools concept. However, these have failed to bring about improvements to our children’s education beyond scoring straight “A”s.

As the Malaysian education system fails, Sarawak is falling behind in preparing our children for jobs, college and for life. When our education system fails, it brings down with it, all the foundations of a strong nation. Rampant corruption all along the government delivery system is the result of an education system that fails to develop individuals of high integrity. The lack of new indigenous technology, products and services that are developed in Sarawak, by Sarawakians shows that our education system has failed to develop thinking, creative, entrepreneurial individuals. The absence of emphasis on arts, humanity and sports in our education system has short-changed the overall development of our young.

These and many more failures of the current government continue to suppress progress and will continue to ensure that our beloved Sarawak lags behind all other states and nations. The failed administration of the current government continues to ensure that Sarawak will forever depend on the federal government for development aid and that many talented Sarawakians will continue to seek high-value jobs elsewhere as none are available locally.

We are anxious about our children’s future. We worry that they could become the first generation of Sarawakians to see their children do worse than they did. We remember that when we were all growing up, our parents knew that if they pushed us to study and work hard, the universities would be open to us and we could get any job we wanted. But today, parents in kampongs and towns all over Sarawak are losing that hope - they're losing the sense that their children will be able to prosper in the global economy.