“Strength lies in differences, not in similarities." — Stephen R. Covey

Have you ever wondered how it would feel to work and learn in an environment where everyone had the same skills, experiences, strengths /weaknesses, and the same preferences in terms of learning topics and projects? How would it make you feel? How much do you think you could grow, learn new things, and develop new skills?

In today’s blog post, we will seek answers to:

• How the human need to belong and fit in affects the way people behave in a community

• What group dynamics is and what fundamental pillars communities are built on

• How we can apply these key concepts to education and help learners learn and grow through diverse environments

• Strategies and techniques you can implement to better understand diversity and improve your personal and professional skills.

Why people desire to belong and fit in

The sense of belonging and the need to be accepted by the members of a community (work team, learning or study group, family, group of friends, etc.) is one of the core needs people experience. Belongingness not only forms our own identity, values and beliefs but also motivates us to put effort into building positive relationships and to work on our best selves.

When we find a community that we are eager to belong in, we naturally tend to conform with the community set of values, beliefs, behaviours and expectations. The more they match with our own sets, the more confident and accepted we feel in the group. This is a good thing, however, in some instances too much conformity can do more harm than good.

Group dynamics and its impact on community

Conformity sometimes referred to as a groupthink. means that we accept and identify with the social norms of a community we are part of. Members whose behaviour goes against the expected behavioural norms risk conflict or social rejection by the social group. Communities are like living organisms and keeping in mind the dynamics will help you create an inclusive, accepting and unique learning environment.

Promoting diversity as a core community value

The principles above reflect the dynamics and fundamental pillars communities are built on. This includes sense of belongingness, acceptance, social norms, risk/fear of social rejection, common values, behaviours, beliefs and expectations.

Communities are rarely ever homogenous environments, whereby everyone has the same values, experiences, strengths, weaknesses and skills. The question is how communities accept differences and encourage diversity among its members, and how comfortable its members feel to express a different opinion or attitude. There is a large spectrum of communities, from diverse-promoting to conform-expecting.

Imagine you are part of a work community where everyone likes playing chess. You seem to be the only one avoiding it, it’s simply not your thing. In a diverse-promoting community, your other likes and strengths are encouraged, whilst in a conform-expecting workplace, you’ll probably learn to like chess (because it’s expected if you want to fit in). Facilitating and nurturing diversity will help everyone be themselves, inspire others, grow personally and professionally, help your community improve as a whole and achieve its goals more effectively. The benefits are limitless!

How to facilitate and nurture diversity in a learning community

Most often, diversity is linked to cultural differences and similarities. However, diversity is much more complex than that. In a learning environment, be it face-to-face or online, you might experience a wide range of differences between students. These may include unique personalities, age, language capabilities, previous experiences, communication styles, aspirations and ambitions, motivations and drivers, expectations, strengths and weaknesses, cultural background, attitudes and mindsets, stress resistance and coping mechanisms, the need to succeed and lead, etc. You have an idea. 

“The real skill of a facilitator and a teacher is to accept differences and help every student in a learning community reach their potential to the fullest.”

To help you begin nurturing more diverse learning communities, we’ve prepared 5 winning strategies and techniques you can apply to face-to-face, blended and/or purely online learning facilitation.

5 Winning strategies and techniques for facilitators and teachers

1. Promote fairness, equity and provide equal opportunities to learn and grow

Promoting fairness, equity and providing equal opportunities to learn and grow for each student in your learning community is a fundamental skill if you want to succeed in creating diverse and inclusive learning communities. 

You might experience different personalities in your learning community, from strongly introverted to greatly extroverted students. I experienced it as a teacher too and one day, I realised how easy it was to overlook introverted students and focus the attention on extroverts who felt more confident to speak up, ask thought-provoking questions, challenge other students and express their opinions and thoughts loudly. Reflecting on my own teaching practices and on students’ needs helped me to create a much more inclusive learning community.

What could have happened if I had not changed the course of action? Introverted students may have perceived extraversion as being a desired social norm and they might have tried to conform and become extraverted in nature. This goal is almost impossible and would have most likely, lead to students  experiencing a sense of  failure and discomfort.

Promoting diversity in this particular learning environment means that introverted and extroverted students are given equal opportunities to learn and grow. Make sure that their voices are listened to equally so everybody feels accepted, involved respected.

Powerful techniques and strategies you could consider and implement are mentoring, pairing up students, group activities, guiding students to develop better social and communication skills, empathy, self-awareness and social awareness, reflecting on social situations you and students experience in learning, using drama and literature to solve social paradigms, and enhance two-way communication within your community of learners.

Creating a non-judgemental and respectful learning environment

This is a good space to mention the importance of creating a non-judgemental learning environment. Diversity, in essence, means accepting differences and perceiving them as community strengths rather than weaknesses. Only in a non-judgemental and respectful community, students can feel confident to express and accept their differences in opinions, likes and dislikes, attitudes, values and behaviours.

How can you create a non-judgmental and respectful learning environment? The most effective techniques and strategies you might like to put into practice are building rapport with students, being respectful towards students and role modelling behaviour, setting the tone, setting positive communication flow between you and students and being empathetic.

2. Learn and upskill yourself/your team of facilitators

Every relationship requires work, effort, time and determination. If you want to build strong, respectful and positive relationships with your students, it will require you to work on it continuously. The time and effort you invest will lead to great returns. 

After identifying skills you’d like to improve, you might like to join a short online course, face-to-face course, attend an evening workshop, meet with an expert doing a presentation, your options are infinite!

3. Get in touch with people from different cultural backgrounds

Have you ever experienced talking with a person from a different cultural background, where you tried to convince them that your arguments and ideas were correct? In many cases, most of us have been in this position.

If you live in a culturally diverse community, don’t be shy to reach out.  The more you talk to people from different countries, the more you’ll be able to understand how they see the world, you’ll learn to look at things from different perspectives and truly understand what they’re trying to say to you. Most importantly, travelling will help you accept different values, behaviour, beliefs and expectations and see them as important as your own.

If you’re not surrounded by people with different backgrounds, you can benefit from travelling. At first sight, this might seem a bit odd but travelling is one of the best things you can do if you want to broaden your horizons and open your mind to different things in life that you simply couldn’t experience in your everyday life.

4. Overcome your own stereotypes and biases

Stereotypes and biases can be huge drawbacks in creating a diverse and inclusive learning community. Think about one common stereotype and how it affects the way you perceive it. Got it? Increasing self-awareness of stereotypes and biases in everyday situations can help you overcome them and be more open to new things in life. In the end, your attitudes and the way you look at differences, will be projected into the learning community and have a significant impact on your students.

5. Create a collaborative and sharing space to learn

The last strategy encapsulates everything we discussed so far. Creating a collaborative sharing space to learn will help students become more confident and connected learners. Giving them space to express their true selves, what they like and dislike or what their thoughts are, will encourage them to share not only what they learn but also who they are.

An online learning community is a good place to create activities that encourage students to share what relates to their own lives, experiences, passions or knowledge. You might like to ask for a feedback or learning reflections so your students will know that their voice matters to you.

What are your thoughts on diversity in learning community? Share with us in the comments below! ← show less

“Strength lies in differences, not in similarities." — Stephen R. Covey

Have you ever wondered how it would feel to work and learn in an environment where everyone had the same skills, experiences, strengths /weaknesses, and the same preferences in terms of learning topics and projects? How would it make you feel? How much do you think you could grow, learn new things, and develop new skills?

In today’s blog post, we will seek answers to:

• How the human need to belong and fit in aff... read more

For this month’s Educator Profile, we sat down with Dr. Tengku Fadilah from Universiti Putra Malaysia to learn more about her thoughts on water safety and her experience teaching on OpenLearning.

Dr. Tengku Fadilah is a former Malaysian national swimmer. She has been advocating water safety awareness for over 26 years through her work with Universiti Putra Malaysia and Life Saving Society Malaysia.

Her mission is to go beyond teaching people how to swim to educating the public about the risks and safety involved with and around water. She is now going online to teach more people about how to be water safe. Here’s what she had to share:

What are your hopes for the course as it transitions online?

I hope that I can penetrate to places where they don’t have access to practical training in water. For example in Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia or places like that, but even they have oasis there and they have paddy fields, they have swamps there, they could still be water safe.

Tell us your experience in designing an interactive online course?

It has been positive all the way. I feel like this is the new way to reach out to students nowadays. It’s quick, it’s interactive and you get unexpected pleasures by meeting new friends online.

How does the online experience compare to conventional methods?

Students get to share and they get to suggest ideas -- and then they start to think critically. We now know that youngsters are all very incline to learn and this is the fastest way, by sharing.

Dr. Tengku Fadilah has been working at the Sports Studies Department, Faculty of Education Studies since 1995. She is also a former national swimmer for Malaysia in the early 80s herself and is still actively participating in National Masters Swimming Competition. In 2004, her expertise lands her the post of Technical Reference Expert to set up the National Fitness Council, and also the Expert Consultant for the Ministry of Youth and Sports for the research on sports associations in Malaysia. She was also appointed by the Minister of Youth and Sports as a member of the Board of Directors of National Instructor Board of Malaysia. Dr. Tengku Fadilah is also the Vice President of Malaysia's Life Saving Society for two straight terms. In July 2005, she wrote the book 'Parental Guide to Water Safety' as a manifestation of her grave concern on the issues of drowning among children. ← show less

For this month’s Educator Profile, we sat down with Dr. Tengku Fadilah from Universiti Putra Malaysia to learn more about her thoughts on water safety and her experience teaching on OpenLearning.

Dr. Tengku Fadilah is a former Malaysian national swimmer. She has been advocating water safety awareness for over 26 years through her work with Universiti Putra Malaysia and Life Saving Society Malaysia.

Her mission is to go beyond teaching people how to swim to educating the public about ... read more

At OpenLearning, we are always working tirelessly to make the platform more efficient and easy-to-use for both educators and students. Our recent platform improvements are focused on advanced settings course designers can use for their courses or institutions.

1. Institution visibility settings

Good news for all institutions on OpenLearning! As an admin, you can now turn your institution ‘Private’ or ‘Public’ from your Institution Settings. To display your institution’s marketing or promotional pages to members (people you invited to the course), select the ‘Private’ setting. If you wish to display marketing promotion pages to anyone with the link to the page, select the ‘Public’  setting. To change the settings, go to “Institution Marketing” and then press “General” to access this setting.

2. Marking in reports

As an assessor, you can now add negative adjustments to student reports to denote things like late submissions.

3. Fixes to embedded media

We’ve made stability fixes to embedded media on the platform. If you haven’t yet embedded any media in your course, it’s a great time to do so! You can add news articles, opinion pieces, and engaging videos in your course to support your content and make it more interesting and relatable.

What's next on OpenLearning

You can look forward to big changes around group allocation, data exports and overall site performance improvements in the near future! ← show less

At OpenLearning, we are always working tirelessly to make the platform more efficient and easy-to-use for both educators and students. Our recent platform improvements are focused on advanced settings course designers can use for their courses or institutions.

1. Institution visibility settings

Good news for all institutions on OpenLearning! As an admin, you can now turn your institution ‘Private’ or ‘Public’ from your Institution Settings. To display your institution’s marketing or ... read more

ACYPI Sydney's Young Entrepreneurs Forum at OpenLearning

Back for the third year, OpenLearning was proud to host the Australia-China Young Professional Initiative (ACYPI) for their annual Young Entrepreneurs Forum event last week! This year’s panel boasted an impressive line-up of entrepreneurs, investors and coaches from HelloFresh, Airtasker, BMY Group and Investible.

SoGal First Meetup in Australia

We proudly partnered with SoGal to host their very first Australian event! SoGal is a global network of diverse entrepreneurs and investors that have attracted more than 50,000 members from over 20 countries. Having hosted events in countries like China, the US, Indonesia and more, SoGal now aims to foster a network of young ambitious women in Australia. The event focused on inspiring women to pursue roles in tech, discover actionable steps for their business ventures, meet role models in technology and entrepreneurship, and educate others with the aim of improving gender diversity in the workforce.

Adam Brimo Begins Term as CEO@Faculty for UiTM

Our CEO and Co-Founder Adam Brimo has been appointed as the new CEO @ Faculty for MARA University of Technology (UiTM) following his previous stint at Sultan Idris Education University (UPSI). CEO@Faculty is an industry-academia collaboration introduced with the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2015-2025 to reduce the mismatch in supply and demand between employers and fresh graduates. Adam spoke to the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry about Heutagogy and he will be visiting more UiTM campuses for more talks.

OpenLearning as University of Science, Malaysia Official MOOC Platform

We are honoured to announce our latest formal partnership with the University of Science, Malaysia (USM). USM has already created 6 MOOCs on OpenLearning since joining our platform in 2015. We are looking forward to continue working with the passionate educators at USM, to bring Malaysian higher education into the global arena. USM is now planning to develop 12 more MOOCs that will be launched on OpenLearning this year! 

What’s on our blog this month:

• Why 'Voice and Choice' Matter To Your Learning Design & Teaching Practice

It’s never too late to join our popular courses:

• Active Learning: from Delivery Towards Facilitation

OpenLearning in the media:

• Our CEO and Co-Founder Adam Brimo is featured as one of Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia

ACYPI Sydney's Young Entrepreneurs Forum at OpenLearning

Back for the third year, OpenLearning was proud to host the Australia-China Young Professional Initiative (ACYPI) for their annual Young Entrepreneurs Forum event last week! This year’s panel boasted an impressive line-up of entrepreneurs, investors and coaches from HelloFresh, Airtasker, BMY Group and Investible.

SoGal First Meetup in Australia

We proudly partnered with SoGal to host their very first Australian event! SoGal is... read more

In an era of educational transformation, as we shift from traditional to more personalised teaching and learning approaches, the concept of voice and choice can significantly improve the way we teach, learn, express ourselves and experience the world around us.

The concept of voice and choice, in essence, emphasises the importance of encouraging students to speak and discuss, collaborate, share, and most importantly, make their own decisions and regulate the process of their own learning. 

The concept is not a stand-alone approach but rather a method which can be easily implemented into any learning environment, including face-to-face, blended and online learning.

“In education, student voice refers to the values, opinions, beliefs, perspectives, and cultural backgrounds of individual students and groups of students in a school, and to instructional approaches and techniques that are based on student choices, interests, passions, and ambitions.” (The Glossary of Education Reform)

What does voice and choice have to do with motivation?

You might ask: “What does voice and choice have to do with intrinsic motivation?” 

Let us give you a simple example.

Imagine that you’ve enrolled in a course ‘Yo hablo Español’. You are excited and enter the course highly motivated to learn Spanish. You envision the course will include role plays,reading and discussing Spanish blogs and news articles with other students, watching Spanish news or TV shows, joining Spanish and Latin meetups and much more! 

However, soon you find out the classes consist of a set of exercises in a Learner’s book, that only involves listening to short recordings and drilling into new vocabulary. By the end of the course, you might have learned how to speak Spanish on a sufficient level but the chances of you enjoying your learning process are quite low. This is in contrast to the amount of learning and enjoyment you could have had from a course that implemented the voice and choice concept.  

As a result, you might drop out of the course or you might keep learning because you already invested in it,  made a commitment, or may have a pay rise at work. 

Now you have an idea how easily intrinsic motivation can be replaced by extrinsic motivators. 

This is similar to what often happens in a restrictive learning environment. 

The aim of high-quality education should be stimulating and maintaining student’s intrinsic motivation to learn by listening to their needs, opinions, giving them opportunities to decide and regulate their learning while letting them experience positive emotions during their learning and reflection. 

Emotions we experience during learning affect our future attitudes towards learning. 

In an era of educational transformation, as we shift from traditional to more personalised teaching and learning approaches, the concept of voice and choice can significantly improve the way we teach, learn, express ourselves and experience the world around us.

The concept of voice and choice, in essence, emphasises the importance of encouraging students to speak and discuss, collaborate, share, and most importantly, make their own decisions and regulate the process of their own lea... read more

At OpenLearning, we are always seeking ways to improve your learning and teaching experiences. Our recent platform improvements are focused on simplifying processes, enhancing page loading time and providing you with relevant notifications.

Simplified Processes

For students, you can now submit posts on behalf of a group. To do so, edit your post and click on share settings, select group work setting, then choose which group you are posting behalf of. Everyone in the group will receive progress and notifications for the post, once it has been shared on their behalf.

For teachers, you can now export auto-marked reports. Click here to learn more on auto-marking and reporting.

Speed Improvements

We have redesigned our ‘Assess Students’ page so that administering larger classes, viewing and filtering students is now easier for teachers. 

Don’t forget to assign the correct staff roles to your course designers or assessors before evaluating students’ results.

To further improve platform speed, images now resize themselves in preview mode, resulting in faster page loading times and better overall speed when using any gallery and content posting page.

Notifications

Students will now be alerted when assessment or report results are made available on the platform through email and platform notifications. In case you are not receiving email notifications, make sure to check your settings by clicking on your profile and selecting notification settings.

← show less

At OpenLearning, we are always seeking ways to improve your learning and teaching experiences. Our recent platform improvements are focused on simplifying processes, enhancing page loading time and providing you with relevant notifications.

Simplified Processes

For students, you can now submit posts on behalf of a group. To do so, edit your post and click on share settings, select group work setting, then choose which group you are posting behalf of. Everyone in the group will receiv... read more

In an online course, facilitation doesn’t just begin when the course opens. 

It starts before your students enter the course and works best with a proactive and nurturing approach. 

There are several ways to facilitate an online course and build a thriving community on OpenLearning. 

Seed your community

No one wants to be the first person at the party so get this ‘party started’ by seeding the community before the course starts.

Seeding refers to creating the first talking points, completing some activities and sharing your ideas (like planting seeds) so that when students first enter the course, there is already plenty of activity for them to get involved.

This is also when you should be setting expectations and modelling ideal responses so students know what type of responses they should be contributing.

Engage with your community

In the early stages of a course, it’s up to you to ensure that students’ contributions are being valued and heard.

Particularly for the first two weeks, you should have a strong online presence, posting and commenting or ‘liking’ students’ posts, to welcome them into the course and offer positive reinforcement.

The language you use in your interactions is very important. Using a tone that is relaxed, friendly and positive will help to create an environment where students feel comfortable to share their ideas, ask questions and discuss freely without judgement. This will also help with promoting peer-to-peer interaction.

Promote social learning

With the right environment, students will start turning to each other for help and support. You can also boost this by doing the following:

Engage rather than tell: When complex questions arise within the community, don’t provide the answer immediately. Instead, suggest ways for students to find the answers for themselves or involve peer-to-peer discussion, feedback and collaboration.

Know when to step back: Provide time and opportunities for other students to answer each others’ queries or provide assistance. Over time, students will learn to take greater ownership for the learning community and become more involved without depending on your guidance.

Maintain your presence by continuing to like students’ comments and posts, along with a few key comments and replies!

Keep learning on track

Liking and commenting

Aim to spend an hour each day on the platform, going through the pages and liking or commenting on students’ posts. Check your notifications for interactions that need responding to and have fun engaging with the community. 

You can also observe and manage community engagement using the following tools: 

Student progress

In the Navigation Bar, click Administer Students > Students to see a percentage of the course completed by each student. This can help you locate areas where further support might be needed.

Analytics

You can find Analytics also under Administer Students. This page offers more detailed information on student engagement such as:

• How many comments have been made on each page,
• Which page has the most activity, 
• Average time spent on each page

You can filter the data to Pages, Students or Comments.

Announcements

Creating announcements will send an email and a notification to all students in the cohort. This is great for staying in touch with students on a regular basis, reminding them of approaching deadlines as well as sharing upcoming topics in the course.

Moderating students’ posts: If necessary, you can also report inappropriate comments and flag spoilers. Flagging comments as spoilers hides the comment and gives students the option to reveal it manually. Reporting comments as inappropriate or disliking comments will hide the comment from the community.

You can find these options under the drop down menu located in the top right hand corner of any comment.

Watch the community take off

As the community becomes more active and more self-directed, learning will take place organically. At this point, enjoy watching the community encourage each other’s learning!  

You can stay on hand to provide extra support when necessary and continue to maintain the rapport and connections you’ve made with students throughout the course.   

This is Part 3 in our series on Facilitation. Click here to read Part 1, The Benefits of Facilitation for an Active Learning Community or here to read Part 2, 5 Practical Ways to Enhance the Online Learning Experience with Facilitation.  ← show less

In an online course, facilitation doesn’t just begin when the course opens.

It starts before your students enter the course and works best with a proactive and nurturing approach.

There are several ways to facilitate an online course and build a thriving community on OpenLearning.

Seed your community

No one wants to be the first person at the party so get this ‘party started’ by seeding the community before the course starts.

Seeding refers to creating the first talking points, co... read more

We are constantly making fixes and improvements to OpenLearning. This month’s new releases are designed to improve efficiency and minimise time spent on assessment administration.

Teachers and course designers can now streamline more of their course set up and enjoy greater time on facilitating valuable learning experiences.

Here are the 3 new features designed to improve assessment on OpenLearning.

Auto Complete Learning Outcome Tags

In this release, we make it easier for you to link your course activities to your learning outcomes. To make use of this feature you must first set up learning outcomes for your course.

A drop down option will appear with the outcomes you have previously set up when adding a tag to a course page.

This will help show alignment in the course and is also a precursor for setting up assessment.

Releasing Assessment Results in Batches

With the introduction of our assessment feature last month, we have added another feature to make assessment more manageable in courses with a large number of students.

You can now release assessment results in batches. To release results in batches, go to Assess Students under Assessment in your course navigation bar.

Choose which assessment you wish to collect the results and click on Batch option at the end of the column. Choose to release or retract results and click Continue to finalise.

Automatic Grading Assessment

To reduce repetitive grading, all quiz related activities (such as Multiple Choice Questions, Crossword Puzzle, Category Matching, Fill in the Blanks, and Matching Answers) can now be auto-marked.

To set up Automatic Grading, go to Assessment -> Assessment Design and create a new Examination Report.

Once a new Examination Report has successfully been created, click Edit to link your quiz to the report.

Choose a page containing quiz widgets you wish to auto-mark and save this report.

To run the automatic grading, go to Assessment -> Assess Students. Find the report you have just set up and click the “Play” button located next to the title. Click “Run” to finalise.

Make sure to assign the correct staff roles to your course designers or assessors before evaluating students’ results.

You can read more on the basics of setting up assessment here. ← show less

We are constantly making fixes and improvements to OpenLearning. This month’s new releases are designed to improve efficiency and minimise time spent on assessment administration.

Teachers and course designers can now streamline more of their course set up and enjoy greater time on facilitating valuable learning experiences.

Here are the 3 new features designed to improve assessment on OpenLearning.

Auto Complete Learning Outcome Tags

In this release, we make it easier for you to li... read more

For this month’s Educator Profile, we sat down with Associate Professor Hazidi Abdul Hamid from Open University Malaysia to learn more about his personal approach when it comes to online teaching and learning.

How will online courses be integrated with your current educational model?

Open University Malaysia focuses on flexible and distance learning. We already have our own online learning environment, but that is only for our students. So what about the people outside? People who have not gotten in yet? So to get them there, what we are planning to do with OpenLearning is to have some courses online and open to everybody. So we give them a taste of some significant learning. Not any kind of learning, we give them something solid which they can bite into and see if they can understand it or if they will like it. Most people would like it I think because learning is fun. 

When you ask people, “Why don’t you come into lifelong learning?” They often say something like “I don’t think I can do that.” This is because the last time they tried doing something like that was years ago at school. So this way, we can tell them, “Why don’t you try this online course?” They can try their hand at it and say “Hey, I can do it!” This encourages them to enrol into more full term learning. So we hope to achieve these two things through our online courses.

What is your experience with creating courses on OpenLearning?

The platform is actually easy to learn, it is actually very easy to learn. However, I noticed that if you are not sure of what you want to do, if you don’t know where you want to go at the end - it is going to take a long time for you to get there. Because with all the choices of tools and widgets you can get distracted. 

So before starting with OpenLearning, before you design your course, you need to know exactly where you are going. The learning outcomes, all the content - once you have all these then you can start filling in all the other stuff. You know, all the exercises and activities, the certification and so on. But at first, if you are not sure where you want to go, it may get a bit distracting. 

What will you say to educators who are about to create their first ever MOOC?


Some might panic because they think they have to redesign everything and come up with something new. Don’t panic! Just take what you have, take whatever course you want to offer, and make a different version of it. 
Break down your course. If you have a course of fourteen weeks, and you have certain amount of content for each week, and if you transfer that to MOOCs -- that is going to be a very heavy course. So break it up into three. Make three courses of five weeks each, and then rewrite what you have in there, make it so you have Course X - Part One, Part Two, Part Three. 
Also, it is different when you write for MOOCs. When you write an academic article, you have to write in a very precise, very scientific language. Not for MOOCs. Remember, you are basically writing for laymen. So, make it easier to understand and make it more digestible. Make it more fun!

What is your personal approach when it comes to online teaching and learning? 

It’s like this, when you teach after some years, a lot of educators sometimes get too serious. I mean, no doubt some disciplines can get very heavy. But with this kind of teaching, the way I see it is like this - you have got to learn how to play. You have to remember how it is to have fun! 

Associate Professor Hazidi Abdul Hamid has been teaching English and Linguistics at Open University Malaysia since 2005. At OUM, Hazidi has spent the last decade being responsible for the production of educational material for the Faculty of Education and Languages. Before that, he also taught English and Linguistics at UKM. Hazidi comes from Kajang, just south of Kuala Lumpur, the famed home of Satay in Malaysia.   ← show less

For this month’s Educator Profile, we sat down with Associate Professor Hazidi Abdul Hamid from Open University Malaysia to learn more about his personal approach when it comes to online teaching and learning.

How will online courses be integrated with your current educational model?

Open University Malaysia focuses on flexible and distance learning. We already have our own online learning environment, but that is only for our students. So what about the people outside? People who ... read more