Category: Learning

The trouble with input-centric education system

Input-centric education decisions have been hampering the advance of Malaysian learners.

The move in September 2014 by the Malaysian Ministry of Education to disallow private higher education institutions (PHEI) to use forecast results for the national high school examination, Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) as a provisional entrance qualification for high school graduates to enter college caused a big row.

The key justification cited by the power that be was that there were abuses by PHEIs and students who did not score the required SPM grades (5 credits for Foundation Studies and 3 credits for diploma, along with specific requirements such as credit in Mathematics etc.) were found to be allowed to continue their studies by some institutions. What was never mentioned in fact was the statistics of such non compliance and what was done to these affected students and PHEIs.

In my column in the first edition of Focusweek (October 17, 2014) I highlighted the issue of Malaysia’s obsession with inputs in all education policies and neglected to evaluate learners’ output, that is, what they have learned and can applied in policy decisions.

Using input-centric policy to be the sole deciding factor on learners’ suitability to be admitted to college is just but one of the idiosyncrasies of Malaysia’s education system. In this system, there is no provision for learners who marginally missed a cutting point for admission into college to have the opportunity for a “second” chance in proving their academic ability. While I was working for Pearson plc as its Regional Quality Manager, I was exposed to the concept of the “Challenge Route” practised by UK’s university for its very popular MBA programme. Anyone, regardless of their academic credentials, if he or she wishes, is given the chance to study for the MBA. Those who did not have the prescribed academic credentials would be given the opportunity to pass three of the 9 required modules as a condition for acceptance. The “Challenge Route” measures the output of these learners. The idea is, if anyone could pass these three MBA modules demonstrate that they have acquired the core knowledge to undertake the remainder of their studies. I think this is a better way to foster a learning culture and pulling down barriers to academic attainment for many people.

Another area I covered in my column is the other grouses of the PHIEs: the insistence of the approving and accreditation authorities on strictly prescribing the input-centric policy of the teaching staff must have a qualification higher than the level of the class that they are teaching. This doctrine of education policy shows that those policy designers really could not tell the difference between academic qualifications, teaching abilities and the value of industrial experience. The policy, at one stroke disallows the great contributions of master craftsmen, artists and designers from imparting their great skills, experiences and insights to younger generations of learners.

Having a PhD does not make one a great teacher. In fact when I started my career in Malaysia’s academia after my postdoctoral stint in Singapore, I did not have any training to be a lecturer. The only teaching I had done was when I served as a demonstrator in laboratory classes and later tutor for undergraduate students. I think the same goes for many PhD holders. People like me, learned quickly on the job and observed how experienced lecturers teach and emulated them.

In 1979 when I was studying for my G.C.E “O” levels at South Shields Marine and Technical College, UK, we had a very good pure mathematics lecturer by the name of Morris Gowland. Gowland did not have a degree. He went to a teacher training school. Yet, compared to other pure mathematics lecturers with Master’s and PhDs, Gowland was far superior in his teaching skills. One look at a struggling student’s work on a pure mathematics question, Gowland would say, “There, you have miscalculated this step,”  As a results, most of us, 4 Malaysians and 5 Hong Kongers passed our mathematics with flying colours. On the other hand, when we were working on our G.C. E. “A” levels, our head of Department Dr. Croucher who holds a PhD in nuclear physics was struggling to teach us nuclear physics in our Physics class. Thus measuring a person’s teaching ability by solely judging if his/her has a degree, Master’s or PhDs is like measuring the size of one’s waist when buying shoes. Thus solely measuring the input (in this case the kind of qualification a teaching staff has) to determine a person’s suitability to teach is a very inaccurate way to reach a crucial decision. It is much better to have an evaluation of a teaching stuff “live” teaching ability rather than his/her having an academic qualification a level higher than the class he/she is teaching as the only gauge. Sadly this is what happens in practice in Malaysian PHEIs.

So why should we be alarmed every year when world university ranking by various systems are published with Malaysian institutions either languishing at the rear end or being “no shows” on the list.

We are not tapping into the vast expertise of our own people. Who would be best to teach business subjects especially entrepreneurships (even as guest lecturers for a few sessions each) than the captains of the respective industries? Yet unless these high flyers have the requisite academic credentials (at Master’s level at least!), the PHEIs would not be allowed to engage them. What a waste of talents! What a loss to the younger learners in Malaysia!

As I  said in my column, unless we as Malaysians break free from our shackles of input-centric mentality, we will always be chasing the tail wind of our competitors.

[polldaddy poll=8380792]

Knowledge: use it or risk losing it

No matter how much of an expert you are in an area, if you do not make use of the knowledge and skills acquired for a prolong period of time, sooner or later, as I had discovered about my knowledge of interpreting statistical analysis, you will find that you have lost these skills.

The best way to re-gain your knowledge is in re-learning and using this knowledge. You may, as I did, not only regain your old skills but pick up new skills (in using PSPP) as well!

[show_post_categories show=”category” hyperlink=”yes”]

[show_post_categories show=”tag” hyperlink=”yes”]

In late September 2014 I was chatting with a former colleague, WC who is a young chap working on his MBA project. Our Facebook conversation revolved around WC’s studies which led to his asking me to help him with the statistical analysis of his MBA project which I consented.

One thing I knew I would not be any better than WC. That is the use of the statistical package SPSS to do the number crunching. I have never used SPSS in my life. When I was a doctoral student back in the late 1980s, we had a rudimentary statistical analysis software that ran from the PC but for “serious” number crunching, we would need to key in the raw data into the minicomputer, the VAX.

In the world of the blind, the guy with one-eye is the king!

It was the early days of the PC era and we just saw these funny looking “typewriters” in the university library. It was the IBM XT personal computer, with 5 and a quarter inch magnetic disk drive. Ever the inquisitive soul that I was, through trials and many errors (including many attempts to learn how to save my work!) I managed to learn enough to use the PC for word processing and later data capturing using Lotus 1-2-3. By then more PC would be made available including one in my department. With some reading from a guidebook (that was the period before the era of Internet) I managed to learn how to export data from Lotus 1-2-3 delimited by commas which the VAX could understand. I no longer had to spend hours at the VAX terminal (and having to queue for it) but to do my raw data transcribing using the PC’s spreadsheet programme. When it came to analyzing these data, it would be just a matter of minutes for me to load in the pre-crunched raw data and obtain my statistical analysis within a few minutes. In the world of the “PC semi-literates” I was the “king” of the faculty. Even the computer technicians did not know how to export Lotus 1-2-3 data in comma-delimited text file and they referred many fellow researchers to me.

I was a sought after person for a while! Analysis of variance, T-test, Chi-square etc which I learned as an undergraduate in 1982 was something I understood well throughout my Master’s and doctoral studies. I even helped many fellow postgraduate students in analysing their research data. I also shared my knowledge with some of these guys who in turn were able to pass this skill along to others.

Learning to use PSPP, SPSS’s Open Source equivalent

Fast forward 25 years, when I thought of helping WC, I realised that learning to use PC-based statistical analytical software like SPSS would not be difficult. In fact I found an Open Source version called PSPP that works very well under my Linux-Ubuntu operated 7-years-old hand-me-down laptop from my son.

I used about 2 days to learn how to use PSPP and by the third day, I had familiarized myself enough of the basics to be able to import raw data from WC. I was also able to carry out most of the required statistical analysis using PSPP.

Losing knowledge that’s not used for a long time

However when I tried to make sense of the analysis churned out by PSPP, I suddenly realised that, after over 20 years of not using my core statistical analysis knowledge, I had to relearn how to interpret these results. My previous career as a commercial research scientist in Singapore in the early to mid 1990s did not necessitate the use of much in terms of statistical analysis. We were interested in finding out if a particular treatment work in multiplying good quality plants inside our test-tubes. We would have to move on without much resources to carry out statistically verifiable experiments on these studies. We were worried about the bottom-line. I was not allowed to publish any proprietary research work which had commercial implications. Thus for 20 odd years, I did not have the chance to use my knowledge of statistical analysis, hence my “losing” much of my former flair in this area!

Luckily, together with WC (plus the help of Google Search), I was able to regain the bulk of my knowledge in this area.  WC was happy with the discussion we had which I hope will lead to his getting a good grade for his MBA project. [footnote: WC passed his MBA shortly after this article was written]

Key lessons learned

There are two key take home lessons from this story:

  1. No matter how much of an expert you are in an area, if you do not make use of the knowledge and skills acquired for a prolong period of time, sooner or later, as I had discovered about my knowledge of interpreting statistical analysis, you will find that you have lost these skills.
  2. “Old dog” (a.k.a. yours truly) can still learn new tricks. In my case, I learned as much from WC as he did from me during our long discussion on how he should be analyzing his MBA project data and how he could interpret the statistical analysis.

The best way to re-gain your knowledge is in re-learning and using this knowledge. You may, as I did, not only regain your old skills but pick up new skills (in using PSPP) as well!

Experts are made, geniuses are born

Anyone can be an expert. You need not be a Nobel Prize winner to be one. You just have to be very good at what your are doing and keep on learning and improving. We have experts in every field of work: electricians, air-conditioning technicians, pest-control technicians, auto mechanics, plumbers, writers, teachers, bankers, managers etc. The only difference between experts in a field and the “so-so” practitioners is that experts have conditioned themselves to continuously learn about their  field. Remember,  there is an expert in every field and anyone can be an expert.

[show_post_categories show=”category” hyperlink=”yes”]

[show_post_categories show=”tag” hyperlink=”yes”]

(Revised: Apr 20, 2018)

This article was first published on Jun 22, 2013 under Dr. Chow’s moniker of “Plantcloner” in Focus Malaysia. The title of the published article was “Gaining expertise through learning”. However, I feel that my original title, pitched to the editor is a better representation of what I  wanted to say: Experts are made, but geniuses are born!

Parents’ aspiration for their offspring – realistic?

Every parent’s dream is for his/her offsprings to be experts of some measure. This is especially true among Asians and Malaysian parents are of no exception. I know of plenty a “tiger mum” and “lion father”.  The social norm is for parents to push their children to read medicine, dentistry, engineering, pharmacy, law etc. etc. at universities. Often the interest of the young high school graduate is ignored. “Mum / dad knows best” seems to be the favourite answer, when challenged by their respective offsprings.  However, the reality is, not all young learners turn out to be experts in studying and many would disappoint their parents. There is an old Chinese saying, “Háng háng chū zhuàng yuán” (行行出状元) which literally means experts / masters / maestros are found  in every profession. It seems that most parents have not registered this.

Any difference between genius and experts?

So what is the key difference between two experts, one a genius and the other an “ordinary” person in any profession or field of work?

I think both the genius and the ordinary person have to learn a lot in their field before they could attain “expert status”. It is just  that the amount of time needed by the ordinary person to learn to be an expert may be a bit longer than the genius.

Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of practice?

Malcolm Gladwell in his book, “Outlier” cited research which showed that experts usually require at least 10,000 hours of learning where continuous improvements during this period have to occur for them to attain “expert” status. The 10,000 hours figure is not absolute, but I think 10 – 20% either way is the norm.  There are lots of examples on expertise attained through learning.

When I was diagnosed with having 2 large stones in my left kidney in 2013, my trust placed upon  my urologist was not formed by the many testamurs that hang on his clinic’s wall. It was because  he told me that he had done over 1,500 times the procedure which he wanted to perform on me, with only 5% having complications. Let us calculate the hours of working (and learning, as each patient’s case was different) for this urologist. A “normal” procedure takes about 2 hours in the operating theatre. Add in 4 hours of various preoperative and postoperative diagnosis and consultation sessions, thus each case needs about 6 hours of the urologist’s time. 1,500 procedures entail at least 9,000 hours of working and learning by the urologist. I am glad I did this quick calculation and my urologist did a good job on me. Of course the fact that he holds two F.R.C.Ss (Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons) gave me added confidence in his ability. But the two F.R.C.Ss were not included in my calculation!

Experts and the fried noodles hawker

Let us look at another profession. Your favourite “char koay teow” or fried noodles hawker. If he picks up his trade working as a fried noodles stall’s assistant, how long will he take to be an expert fried noodles hawker?

Assuming that he has already picked up the basics in frying noodles and is ready to set up his own stall.  If he works  8 hours per day for 6 days a week, it would have taken him just about 4 years to clock in 10,000 hours to be an expert “char koay teow” hawker. That is assuming that he gets feedback from his clients and keeps on improving. Of course, if he did not learn enough in the first place and his fried noodles taste like rubber bands with seasoning there is no question of him attaining the “expert” status! His business would probably have folded within a short while.

Plantcloner’s own experience

So what about my own experience in attaining my expertise?

My master’s and doctoral studies at the Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland took me 5 years to complete.  At 40 hours a week of laboratory work and studies and 50 working weeks per year, in theory, when I completed my doctoral studies, I had clocked in about 10,000 hours. I should have been an expert in my field as a fresh PhD holder.

But I am no genius, in fact it took me another year, working in the National University of Singapore’s research laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher before I dared to hold my head up a little among experts in my field. Later, when I got a job as a commercial laboratory’s research scientist,  I had to re-learn a lot of my trade in this profit-driven establishment. My biggest culture shock was having to scale up my work from research laboratory to production scale. It was another year of learning before I “graduated” as a commercial scientist. So it took me at least 14,000 hours of learning to be an expert in my field of commercial plant tissue culture.

Geniuses are born, but experts are made

Thus geniuses are born, but experts are made. The two are not synonymous. It does not  matter if you are a genius or not, to be an expert, you need to put in a lot of hard work and perseverance. You need to have the attitude to learn and improve and do so continually.

Anyone can be an expert. You need not be a Nobel Prize winner to be one. You just have to be very good at what your are doing and keep on learning and improving. We have experts in every field of work: electricians, air-conditioning technicians, pest-control technicians, auto mechanics, plumbers, writers, teachers, bankers, managers etc. etc. and of course those in the “in” professional fields like doctors, dentists, engineers, lawyers and  scientists.

The only difference between experts in a field and the “so-so” practitioners is the fact that experts have conditioned themselves to continuously learn about developments, new technologies, market demand, regulatory environment etc.. about their  field. Thus Continuous Professional Development (CPD) and lifelong learning (LL) are two inescapable commitments that professional bodies have levied on their members. All self respecting experts of any field that worth their  salt will tell you how much of CPD or LL they have committed to each year.

Give the kid a chance!

So the next time a child tells you that when she/he grows up she/he wants to be a baker, a plumber, an electrician or a “char koay teow” hawker, do not belittle him/her or the job. Instead, you should tell him/her more about the job, the industry, and the work involved in that industry. Plumbers and electricians are some of the richest trade professionals in the West!

Remember,  there is an expert in every field and anyone can be an expert.

Footnote: Plantcloner declares that he has never been a “lion dad”, though he exerted a lot of influence on his son, the young learner  has chosen his major for his college studies independently.

How to pass every exam that you take

In the previous article, I covered the importance for learners to know the syllabus of each subject that they are taking in what I termed “knowing your enemy” to achieve “smart learning”. This article digs deeper into knowing your other enemy, the dreaded examination. I have passed every single academic examination in my long study career at university of eight and a half year and hence have the “formula” to share.

In the academic settings, even if you know your “enemy” well and have all the facts and figures of the subject, you are still not there yet – the “last mile” is how you translate this knowledge into marks. Examination is perhaps better associated as the “enemy” by most learners. The key to conquering your examination blues lies in how you can maximise your mark scoring potential with the knowledge that you have attained.

There is not much in terms of examination taking technique to multiple choice questions. You have to be sure of the marking format, whether marks are taken off for wrong answers. Aside from this, you just have to be careful that you shade the correct answers for each question and put a mark on the question paper to tell you that you have answered the question. All multiple choice paper will be very time constrained, so your “thinking time” per question is very limited. You just have to answer as many questions as possible. Move on to the next question if you are stuck (making a notation on the question paper so that you can come back to this later if time permits). If there is “no penalty” for wrong answers, then if you are unsure of the correct answer, just “guess” and move on. If there is a “penalty” for wrong answers, you will be best to leave any questions that you have doubt unanswered and concentrate on those that you are confident of answering correctly. You need to read and understand all the choices offered in each question and do your best to spot any “trick” questions. I must admit, multiple choice question is not my favourite form of assessment whether as a student or an examiner. For Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), multiple choice question is the format used extensively. In the case of MOOC, a great many variations of the classic “one correct answer” multiple choice question have evolved. These include having learners choose more than one answers (and scoring both the chosen and unchosen answers), thus making the choice by learners a lot more complicated.

For essay type of questions, you will likely be given ample time to write your answers. There will usually be some choices, such as you need to answer 4 out of 6 questions etc. You should act like an investor of stock and shares: evaluate each and every question and figure out how many marks you will likely to score for each question before making your choice. But before that, try to read and understand in detail what each of the questions are asking. Jot down in point form the relevant answers. If you have done your studying well, you probably would have constructed some mind maps or concept maps while revising. Try to draw these for your answers. Label each concept map with the question number. Always ask for an extra examination answer booklet and use this to jot down the answers in point form together with your mind maps and concept maps, this will be your answer plan. Do not forget to fill in the candidate details as required on this answer booklet. When you have completed the answer plan for all the questions that you can answer, you should then proceed to evaluate how well you are likely to score mark for each question and decide on your choices. Only then should you begin to write according to the answer plan. If you are running out of time and you have one or two questions to complete, you can make use of the relevant section of your answer plan and submit these as your answers (crossing out those that you have already completed). This way you are extending your chances to score marks. Examiners are trained to look out for ways to understand if a candidate has provided relevant answers to a question. Even if your answer is in point form and with a mind map, it will still be acceptable and you can salvage a good portion of the marks. You are in fact “maximising” your marks by doing so rather than having no answers for these questions.

The choice of questions is also a key consideration. Given equal potential to score, I always choose questions that are long and avoid one-liner questions if possible. The logic is simple. If a question is a one-liner, it will usually be very broad-based. There is little in the form of clues for you to pinpoint what the examiner needs to see for you to score. For multi-paragraph questions, you will have a clear indication of what the question entails and it is very unlikely that your answer will go off in a tangent. I will also choose to answer questions on topics that I know are not so popular (a knowledge of this gained during lectures and during discussions with fellow coursemates). This is a strategy that will work if you can answer questions in the “unpopular” topics well. The rationale is simple, the examiner will be reading a great many answers on “popular” topics and thus has a lot more cases to compare. If you are offering answers to “unpopular” questions, it will be something different, a “breath of fresh air” and you stand a better chance of impressing the examiner.

Another examination technique that has been used but with varying results is the spotting of questions. This involves studying the trend in the topics examined in past year questions and using the statistics along with the syllabus to home in on topics that are likely to be featured in the examination. This is a very dangerous strategy. Unless you are like my applied mathematics lecturer in GCE “A” levels who has years of experience teaching and “spotting” questions, your payoff may not be good. I faced the exact dilemma during my first year at university. In the early 1980s, my university did not practice the provision of a syllabus for each subject. A topic might warrant only a two minutes mention in class and yet when it came to the examination, we would be expected to write a long essay on the very topic. Hence we have one crucial “enemy” that we would have trouble defeating. Animal physiology was a subject taught by a team of 8 veterinary researchers who were very generous in giving us printed notes. The trouble was, every one of these lecturers gave us copious amount of notes and extra reading with the effect that students did not know what was crucial. I teamed up with my college mate and analysed 5 years’ worth of past year questions to limit the notes that we had to study (about 2 rims of paper in thickness) to something more manageable. On the day of the examination both of us were stunned – of the eight essay questions (in which we were to choose five), we spotted only two and a half questions. We did not take into consideration that my university’s system dictated that every three years there should be a change of external examiner for every subject. We had a new external examiner that year who changed the way examination questions were to be composed and the topics that were to be examined. I scraped through but sadly my study buddy did not.

Open book examination seems to be an “easy” option at first glance but in fact is the most difficult for learners to score well. The questions that come with open book examination sometimes give you no clue as to what are the appropriate points to be included in your answer. These questions also tend to be more complicated and include a lot of application of the knowledge of the examinees. The hardest part for some learner in this type of assessment is knowing what to include and what to exclude from the answer. The chances of mis-reading the questions are very high. Even the best student could be floored by an open book examination as it did one of my top performing engineering students in a project management subject some years back.

I hope the sharing of my “formula” for “smart examination taking” would help adult learners in conquering their examination blues and help to ease the burden for those who are resuming their studies. The same “formula” will also work for young learners. So far I have not covered any tips on doing desk research and writing good assignments, this is a topic for another article.

This is a revision of the original article submitted to Focus Malaysia that was published in August 2013 under Dr. Chow’s moniker of “Plantcloner”. Dr. Chow provides education management consultancy and technology commercialization advisory as a principal consultant of MyGreenCircle.

If your business ain’t online, you don’t exist

If you run a brick-and-mortar business, you will do well to have a presence online. A small business delivering flyers and related business promotional materials in Ipoh, Malaysia, Flyersam solved its difficulties in gaining new clients as by being online with Google Suite.

[show_post_categories show=”tag” hyperlink=”yes”]

If you run a brick-and-mortar business, you will do well to have a presence online. Just over 5 years ago my younger brother who has a small business delivering flyers and related business promotional materials in Ipoh, Malaysia related about his difficulties in gaining new clients as his business, Flyersam was relatively new in town. As I was already very familiar with Google Sites and Google Apps (having used these extensively in my previous appointment as the deputy principal of a college), we decided to make use of what I know to put Flyersam online.  The free version of Google Apps was still available in 2010.

With an investment of just US$9.90 which was the cost of registering the flyersam.com domain name via Google, we set to work. Sam’s job was to get me the relevant content and photographs to be included into flysam.com. I constructed a simple website using Google Sites. By March 2010, flyersam.com was bringing in about 2 – 3 enquiries per month from clients, many of whom found flyersam via online search and most were not even located in Ipoh.

The flyer distribution business requires the distributor to show proof that they have completed the job as assigned to clients by taking and sending relevant photographs to the clients. Thus it was easy for me to suggest to Sam that he should upload some of these “proofs of delivery” photographs to his website as updates. However, Sam was still not confident enough to post updates to his website regularly. But like most Malaysians, he and his sons were great users of Facebook.

My next project for Flyersam was to set up a Flyersam Facebook Page where Sam or one of my nephews could easily post “proofs of delivery” as updates. Sam himself having learned to use Wechat with his smartphone recently is now also posting similar updates regularly.

As flyersam.com is registered under my name, I routinely get at least a couple of calls a month from prospective clients. Thus for the yearly expenditure of only about US$10.00, Sam has been getting at least 5 additional enquiries per month, most of which are usually translated into sales. Sam buys the beer these days whenever I visit him in Ipoh.

Flyersam is a typical example of how a small business can leverage on a simple website and social media to generate sales. The Google sponsored Get Malaysian Business Online (GMBO) campaign of 2011 was a huge success with 12,000 businesses having benefited from it and having a web presence. Building on the success of GMBO, in 2012 the Malaysian Government set aside a budget of RM50.00 million (US$15.63 million) to provide small and medium businesses (SME) with RM1,000 (US$312.00) grant (GMBO Grant) to build their websites. The grant had been fully utilized before the end of 2013.

[Note on Apr 13, 2018: this campaign ended, I think after the grant was exhausted]

The entire domain name registration, web hosting and website creating business is so competitive these days, both locally and internationally, that someone with a rudimentary website creating knowledge can easily put together a simple business website for about RM100.00 (US$32.00) per year. Google Apps for Business which costs US$50 (RM160) per year for 1 user is another alternative that is very simple to use, if one is willing to do some trial and errors. Thus even if there is no more grant available, the cost of having your business website online is still very affordable.

However, I do not think everyone of the beneficiaries of the GMBO campaign or the GMBO grant would have the kind of success as did Flyersam.com which was created without GMBO privileges or GMBO grant. Many of these business websites do not receive regular or any updates after their creation and there lies the problem.

Having a business website without regular updates gives visitors very little confidence on the dependability of that business. The visitors have no way of telling if the business concerned is still active. Hence my insistence on having Flyersam.com linked to its Facebook Page and having regular updates at least on Flyersam’s FB Page is the crucial success factor for Flyersam. In today’s connected business environment, customers will not look up the telephone directory if they want their flyers distributed. They will most likely do a search online to find out who can provide this service to them.

For a brick-and-mortar business to have an online presence is just as important as for those running online businesses. In today’s internet age, if your business is not online, to most of your prospective clients, you do not exist! But having a business website but not bothering to update it is as bad as not having a website at all. People checking out vendors for services will look closely to see if your business is still active before they will be confident enough to try your services or products out.,

Selling your idea in one page

During the 1990s I used to listen to BBC World Service on shortwave radio, using a headphone while working in my laboratory. I was serving as the Research Scientist for a major freshwater aquatic plants exporter in Singapore. There was a programme on films review, “On Screen” that I particularly looked forward to. I took part in some of the show’s contests and won two T-shirts from the BBC. On hindsight, I realized that there must have been hundreds of correct entries to each contest but I wondered why mine was chosen as the winner. Then I got my answer. My employer produced very nice photographs of his products and printed some of these as postcards which I used for the contests (to help in marketing our products). I think it was the attractive waterlily flowers on the postcards that I sent in that got my entry noticed and chosen.

In the era where there are many “equals” fighting for attention of decision makers, it will often be the one with the best communication strategy who will be chosen as the winner. The producer of BBC’s On Screen had chosen my entries as winners twice, I think the subliminal advantage I had in using very attractive postcards of waterlily gave me the edge.

When I was a young graduate student working on my Master’s degree, I was fortunate to have met a kind visiting professor from the USA. Professor Gerald Jung of Pennsylvania State University taught me that I must create a one-page resume as recruiters would not have the time and patience to read anything longer. I went on to write my one-pager which was repeatedly tore to pieces by the good professor. He explained kindly to me (after shredding my draft resume) that I had only at most one shot at catching the eye of the recruiter, and having an attractively produced one-pager is therefore a no-brainer. That was in 1986 and I learned a great lesson from a very kind gentleman who bothered to give me the time and advice and is forever grateful for the wisdom he conferred me.

It was unfortunate for me to discover the magic of concept map much later in life, for it has many practical applications, especially when you want to put an idea on paper among others. When I was working as the Director of Special Projects for an established education group, I would have to translate my boss’s ideas (which he would be generating at least 2 or 3 a month) into a working proposal complete with financials, bells and whistles. These ideas would often begin life as a three-lines memo to me! But often the boss would have additional inputs or a change in the features of his ideas. To capture all these in words and to handle the constant changes in directions would be rather difficult and messy.

By chance I discovered concept map and a great piece of software (cross platforms and free) by the name of CmapTools. I would always translate the boss’s command into a concept map using CmapTools and discuss with him about the business idea, modifying the concept map (as CmapTools made this a relatively painless task) as we went along. At the same time, I would commence my desk research so that I could add on to the boss’s business idea. I would only commence writing after the boss has agreed on the main points of the idea as presented in my one-page concept map. Essentially I had to sell the “executable” form of the boss’s business idea in the form of a one-page concept map back to him!

From formulating of business ideas I extended concept map usage to organising ideas to write speeches. In fact all speeches I wrote for my bosses including those presented by the company’s chairman and later the CEO at their respective honorary doctorate conferment ceremonies in Australia and England began “life” as a one-page concept map. Again, I sold the idea for the speech back to the bosses effectively using one-page concept maps.

With today’s demanding business environment, most people do not have the luxury of time to read through the many documents that they will encounter each day. Thus the “short-sharp-shock” strategy is needed to fight for your target audience’s attention. While I cannot say that my one-page concept map idea can create the “shock” effect, it is certainly concise and right to the point in its approach. Nowadays, when I am asked to send in my resume for any purposes, I will always send in my one-page resume done in the form of a concept map to set myself apart from the rest. My concept map resume may not be pretty or shockingly attractive, but it is different and convey much more information than I could write in an A4 page. In addition, concept maps are designed to make it easier for the reader to pick up details and to have a much better recall on what was presented. If you are looking for a job, this brings you added advantage.

This brings me to my principle on presenting and selling an idea: If an idea cannot be presented in an A4 page, it is still not yet a good idea.

And you can quote me on that!

Smart learning to conquer exam blues

I studied over eight years at university which is much longer  than most people. As a result I am often being introduced by former schoolmates and college mates as “he who likes to study” to their friends, offsprings and spouses.  Naturally, I do get lots of requests from every corner for advice on “how to study”.   Aside from having the credential of having been a “veteran university student”, I asked myself what do I have to offer about learning and conquering examination blues. It then dawn on to me that I had passed every major academic examinations so far at first sittings. I even passed my motorcycle riding test and my driving test at first attempts. There  must be some sort of a “formula” that I can share. And there is.

For working adults who have already hung up their schoolbags yonks ago, taking on any academic learning is a daunting task that can cause a great deal of anxiety and stress. Work demand and family commitments are just two of the more obvious hurdles. Balancing these and finding the time and a quiet place to study can be quite a chore.

Let us start with Steven Covey’s famous quote, “Begin with the end in mind”. In an academic setting, examinations of one form or another are inevitable. “The end” in your mind will depend on your aspiration, to pass or to ace the final examination. However the “formula” for both are the same, the difference is in the amount of effort that you would need to commit.

Sun Tzu said, “If you know yourself and know your enemy, in a hundred battles, you will never fear the result.”, so your first task is to know yourself, then your “enemy” –  the examination.

“Knowing yourself” means you must be truthful to yourself and devise a good time management habit to juggle work, family and learning. Talk to your family and agree on some form of “me time” during your rest days (Saturday and Sunday) or during the evening after work. You must have a good idea how you spend your non-working hours and “steal” some of the leisure or idle time for studying. You also need to find a place to have the peace and quiet for you to concentrate on your learning. Personally, I find early in the morning at the office a good time to learn. Although the duration is rather  short  (45 minutes or less), it is the distraction free and unwinding after a stressful rush hour traffic to the office that make this a quality learning slot for me. You will need to find your own slots and set aside sufficient time to take on your learning effectively. You need to plan your learning schedule so that you have sufficient time to complete the requirements of the learning programme that you have signed up. Do not be over ambitious and sign up more subjects that you can handle. As a rule of thumb, full-time, 18 -23 year-old undergraduates can cope with 4 or 5 subjects during a full semester. Working adults probably can cope with 2 or at most 3 subjects concurrently. In fact most part-time postgraduate programmes rarely push learners to take more than 2 subjects per semester.

The other aspect of “knowing yourself” is the learning technique that you can adopt. For many working adults resuming learning after years of working, adopting a good learning technique is important for them to regain the learning prowess of their school days. One of the first re-learning that needs to be tackled is in note taking. The Cornell Note Taking System (http://coe.jmu.edu/learningtoolbox/cornellnotes.html) is a good system to adopt . Briefly, a page for notes is divided into three sections; two columns and one row (about 5 cm) below the columns. The right column which is 75% of the page is used to record notes. The left column is for key points for the topic covered by the notes to be extracted. The bottom row is to be used to summarise the topic. Thus when revising, the learner will concentrate on the key points and the summary.

Another learning technique is to construct mind maps and concept maps to assist learners to “picturise” a topic and how key points are linked. The act of constructing these maps will itself cause the learners to ponder and think about the facts and figures of a topic and how these can be linked. The key difference between concept maps and mind maps is in the fact that mind maps have one central theme or topic while concept maps caters to the linkages of several concepts, showing the relationships between them. It was too bad for me to discover the magic of concept map a bit late in life. The technique would have helped me a great deal since I am a “pictorial” type of learner. No matter what type of learners you are, the very act of constructing a concept or mind map will involve your thinking through the topic and making sense of the facts and figures while summarising them in a map. All these count towards strengthening your knowledge and factual recall ability on that topic.

The “enemy” in the context of “knowing your enemy”refers not only to the final examination but the entire inputs that you must make and the learning outcomes that you should attain in your academic quest. Many people make the big mistake of not associating the biggest “enemy” as the syllabus of the subject that you are studying and paid dearly for it. I studied for my GCE “A” levels in the early 1980s in a technical college in England. The college was catering to vocational and technical students and academic programmes were offered as “resit” options for those who did not do well in their first attempts. The teaching staff was accustomed to preparing their “A” level students to pass their examinations but the few foreign students like my peers from Malaysia and Hong Kong wanted (and needed) to score our grades in  A or B to read engineering, medicine etc. at universities. I learnt two things very fast. Firstly the lecturers were only doing enough to ensure that we could pass the examinations, and they were not going to cover the full syllabus. Secondly, to score grade B or better, I needed to get hold of the syllabus of each subject to know the content inside-out.  I managed to beg and persuade most of my lecturers to help me to cover topics that were not included in their lectures. Due to the clash of time-table those of us who took three sciences (biology, chemistry and physics) were only allowed to take pure and applied mathematics if we were to attend the applied mathematics classes held in the evening which was a revision class and was therefore shorter in duration for each session and the number of sessions. Our lecturer was brilliant. He studied the syllabus well. He only had time to cover about 60% of the syllabus but he focussed on essential topics that would be sufficient to secure a pass for his students. With this focussed approach, we were able to not only pass but score very well in the final examination.

One of my colleagues during my GCE “A” level days was considerably more  hardworking than me. He read broadly and deeply into biology, physics and chemistry, devouring lots of magazines and books covering these subjects. He knew these subjects a lot better than me. But when the results of the final examination were announced, he was stunned that he only passed 2 of the three subjects while I did a lot better than expected. He did not know his “enemy” like I did because he ignored studying the requirements of the syllabus for each subject.

Nowadays providing detailed syllabus is the obligation of all colleges. The document spells out clearly what the students need to study and how the knowledge gained is to be applied. Teaching plans and learning outcomes  should be provided. You should, like I did, know your syllabus inside-out. Knowing what is required and what is not is key to your success in examinations. This is what I call, “smart learning”.

In the next article, I shall cover “smart examination taking”.

This article first appeared in August 31, 2013 edition of Focus Malaysia, under Dr. YN Chow’s moniker as Plantcloner.

Reading deep into university ranking

This is the original unedited text of an article that was published in Focus Malaysia on Sept 28, 2013 under my moniker of Plantcloner.

 

Each year when the “season” for various world rankings of universities descend upon us, there would be knee-jerk reactions if Malaysia’s “top” universities do not perform well. Institutions that“performed” better in the latest ranking will have lots of explanation for their “successes” and if they do not do well in one ranking but “so-so” in the next, we will also be given plenty of coverage in the media too.

However, I wonder if anyone bother to ask this simplest of question: are we comparing apples with oranges when we compare across different rankings? Did the Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings look at similar criteria as Quacquarelli Symonds’s QS World University Rankings? How about U.S. News’s Best College Rankings (of U.S. institutions) compared with Forbes America Top Colleges List? How come some universities “did” reasonably well under one ranking system but not another?

Unless we know the methodology of each of the ranking systems and “adjust” the data accordingly, we are always comparing apples with oranges as no two ranking systems adopt the same methodology. Even if they look at the same criterion, the weighting given and the manner in which the data has been compiled and analysed vary greatly between ranking systems. However, one thing is clear, the same top 10 to 40 institutions usually appear in the same range in most of the ranking systems. But this does not tell us if a particular ranking system captures data relevant to the key stakeholders: the students and parents. Ranking systems that award similar rankings to these top 40 institutions could just be looking at the same criteria or these 40 institutions have the same sort of features that result in favourable scores that resulted in the high rankings.

I have evaluated four ranking systems mentioned earlier and unsurprisingly, Times Higher Education and QS World (and to a lesser extent, U.S. News) have many similar criteria in their respective ranking systems. This could be the key reasons for many institutions appearing in similar ranking positions across these two systems.

Only Forbes places any relevance in asking students to score their learning experience and satisfaction. Forbes also is the only one that uses several evaluation channels to provide some measure on “returns on investments”such as the salary of alumni and alumni who have made a name for themselves and appear in Forbes lists (Power Women, 30 Under 30, CEOs on the Global 2000), plus Nobel and Pulitzer winners, Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellows, those elected to the National Academy of Sciences and winners of an Academy, Emmy, Tony or Grammy award etc. Hence Forbes puts some weight in how “powerful” and influential the alumni of an institution are/were in society as a measure of their successes. Forbes also gives significant weighting on the ability of student to service their debt as key criteria and hence covers the employability and salary commanded by the graduates via such a measure.

I think a good ranking system will answer four basic questions that a student (or parent) needs to consider:

(a) How easy for me to get accepted to this institution? The relevant entrance requirements for a range of fields of studies need to be evaluated. Perhaps SAT or CAT scores for the North American college systems, GCE “A” levels and other pre-university qualifications need to be provided and evaluated.

(b) What percentage of applicants are accepted each year? This gives a good indication on how popular an institution is and how stringent is its selection process.

(c) How much will it cost? Are financial assistance provided for high achieving students? This give a measure of how much it will cost to finance a student through his/her studies. The provision of financial assistance to high achieving students is a measure of how well an institution is endowed .

(d) How fast does the average graduate gets a job after graduation and what is the average starting salary for fresh graduates of this institution? What percentage of graduates get jobs in their areas of studies?

Most of the ranking systems cover (a) to (c) in some measure of detail but only Forbes covers (d) which is one of the most important reasons for a student to go to university: to be able to secure a good job and build a career in his/her chosen field .

Another measure of academic quality is the percentage of fresh graduates that progressed to postgraduate studies. However a more precise measure is the percentage of PhD graduates that secured postings to carry out postdoctoral studies within 6 months of graduation. This shows how “popular” an institution’s PhD holders are and how the other institutions rate the quality of the research training of that institution. None of the ranking systems evaluated cover this which is a very good direct peer-review of an institution.

A good ranking system, aside from measuring the outputs (i.e. the quality of the graduates) also needs to provide a measure of students’ happiness with their lives while at college. Only Forbes provides a good measure of this aspect to rate the facilities, the teaching and the overall experience of the students.

Apart from the various criteria used by a ranking system, the manner in which the data are collected requires detailed evaluation. Some like Times Higher Education and QS World rely heavily on scoring of the academic reputation of institutions by their peers or professional students recruiters / counsellors. In addition, heavy weighting is often given to this criterion. To me this serve no purpose at all as it is highly subjective without any concrete data that can be used by the scorers to objectively assign a score to an institution. Measuring the research output of institutions (such as the number of papers published per PhD thesis approved; the average number of citations received by each teaching staff per year, the percentage of PhD holders getting postdoctoral research jobs etc. ) serves as a better yardstick.

Some ranking systems like QS World use “employer reputation” (how employers rank the institutions in terms of the quality of their graduates) which covers the employability aspect well. This is rather a very subjective way of measuring reputation. A more objective measure would be to rank or score an institutions on what percentage of their fresh graduates are hired each year by multinationals, Fortune 500 companies, 100 largest companies etc. in the country. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. We need to know if getting a degree from an institution will allow the graduate to a) get a job readily, b) join a network of powerful and influential alumni (to enhance his/her career development prospect); c) get a job that pays her/him sufficiently to allow the servicing of any debt incurred in the process of studying for the degree. In fact way back in 1999 when I first visited New Delhi on business, I was amazed to read advertisements placed by private higher education institutions in major newspaper that read something like this: “90% of our graduates found placements in multinational and major Indian corporate giants such as XYZ. with starting pay of ZZZ rupees per month”. There was (and still is) intense competition in the market and these private institutions of higher learning were trying to distinguish themselves by getting job placements for their graduates with major employers that paid well. I feel that any university ranking systems that ignore this crucial criterion is not giving the readers an accurate picture of the “value” generated by each institutions for its graduates.

Another measure of an institution’s reputation is in its industrial linkages (and hence the ability to place its graduates in industry). This could simply be the amount of research funding per faculty member that it receives from industry. Related to this, how well an institution is perceived to serve industry can be measured by the value that research and development activities of this institution bring to industry. This can be measured indirectly by the value of commercialization per faculty member per year that an institution has carried out. This also measures the innovative capability and entrepreneurship of an institution.

This is not a comprehensive evaluation of the different university ranking systems. I merely demonstrated that with a bit of drilling down of the methodology we can discover a lot more about these ranking systems and their relative shortcomings. One should therefore, when reading reports of these ranking systems take a heavy pinch of salt. We can use them as rough yardsticks to gauge the “reputation” of an institution at best but one should not read further beyond this. We should be reminded that, no matter how high an institution is ranked by a system, if its graduates are not able to secure jobs in the relevant fields, then there is a disservice being performed by that institution to its stakeholders.

Footnote:
Plantcloner has evaluated many institutions in Asia Pacific when he served as the regional quality manager of a UK-based publishing-education company. He believes that an institution’s reputation is only as good as the graduates that it has produced.

Plagiarize and risk getting stigmatized

No body wants to be labelled as a cheat. That is something given for granted. In the academic world, the worst sin is none other than being caught as a plagiarist. Getting stigmatized by your peers and society at large is the consequences of being caught.

In the days before the internet era and before the rise of the mighty search engines like Yahoo and later Google, the risk of getting caught if you lift sections of work from others assignment or even published work was remote. This is especially so if you are just writing a term paper or an essay that get filed (and later thrashed). But today, with the rise of the internet and more and more literature, thesis, even essays are published or made available online by authors, the life of the plagiarist is getting riskier by the minute.

I have submitted an article for my column in The Heat which deals with a few examples from my own experience as a research scientist and a college lecturer which I hope the editor will accept for publication.

The availability of many plagiarism detection services with access to huge databases, fast and effective search engines means that to cheat on one’s academic work now is a very risky affairs. Even those who had plagiarized and it seems that their bad deeds were not detected when the work was submitted and accepted, the freedom of information principle and the eventual inclusion of the plagiarists’ work in one or more databases will lay bare the fraud committed sooner or later.

On August 7, 2014, it was reported that prominent US senator John Welsh was forced to quit his re-election campaign due to the exposure of his being a plagiarist. Welsh’s 2007 act of plagiarism for his master’s degree assignment was only exposed recently. The plagiarism committed and uncovered was clearly detected and published in fine details in which the detection software not only picked up “blow-by-blow”  the act of plagiarism committed by Welsh, it even pointed to which paragraphs, sections and entire page that were copied and from whom the relevant content was lifted. It was reported that Welsh’s alma mater may be rescinding his master’s degree. Hence being stigmatized by the academic community is just the beginning of Welsh’s woes, now losing his political career is far more damaging.

Once you are labelled as a cheat, in today’s digital world it means that you are forever digitally branded as a cheat. That is the peril of plagiarism. So those who have cheated in order to gain their academic degrees should rightly be worried sick now. This is because someone, somewhere and some time in the future will uncover your bad deeds. It is just a matter of time that you will be caught. There is no escape!

The M in MOOC stands for Massive!

Inside Higher Ed reported that the University of Wisconsin – Madison is revamping its Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) offering. It will put emphasis on MOOCs that have local interests. This was done at the back of 3.2% average completion rate for Wisconsin – Madison’s MOOCs. Although this is low, it still falls within the 3 to 7 % range that is the average for MOOCs in terms of completion rate.

As a “veteran” MOOCer, I think Wisconsin-Madison has missed the whole point about MOOC by going local. MOOC is the means by which academic and other learning institutions can extend their reach to learners at all corners of the world whose only criteria of participation (aside from prior knowledge specific to some courses) is access to the Internet. Local learners can well afford the time (and resources?) to take up on-campus courses. By “going local” there may be many consequences such as:

  1. Lower sign up figures:

With an averagely popular MOOC, you can expect at least 30,000 enrollment. With local-focused MOOCs, you will bound to have a much lower enrollment figure as your subject will not have broad enough interest to the “Massive” part of MOOC. Hence a figure of 3,000 enrollment is already very generous, I think it will be more in the range of 800 – 1500. You will not have the kind of geographical reach that MOOC is designed to bring. Will you still be able to “qualify” your courses as MOOCs?

2. Lower total number of people completing the MOOCs: (Is completion rate more important than the number of learner benefiting from your MOOCs?)

The cost of putting up Wisconsin-Madison’s revamped MOOCs, IMHO will not be that much different from the previous version. With 4% completion rate of the “old” MOOCs and with say 30,000 enrollment, you would stand to educate and benefit 1,200 people. With an enrollment figure of 1,000 and a completion rate of say triple of the conventional 4%, you will only educate more or less 80 people. Hence your return on invested effort (the MOOC industry has still not figured out a business model, thus it is best to measure return on invested effort rather than investment at this point) will be very low.

To benefit 80 – 100 local learners, you might as well provide free on-campus delivery of the course rather than using the more expensive MOOC system.

I think what Wisconsin-Madison needs to do is to look into the delivery system of their “old” MOOCs and find out from learners or if possible engage a sample of learners (with incentives) to give them answers to what work for the learners and what elements are the “turnoffs”. By improving the completion rate by just 2 to 3 percent, a significant increase in the number of people benefiting from the institution’s MOOCs can be attained.

What elements of an MOOC that worked for me may not work for everyone. However in my case I think these are, for me at least the success factors in an MOOC:

(a) Clear and concise learning objectives and learning outcomes. The kind of pre-requisite knowledge and skills must be well specified as well. The syllabus must be well written and available BEFORE the course commences to allow learners to judge whether they want to or have the pre-requisites to benefit from enrolling and learning.

(b) Tie to (a) a series of short video lectures, “purpose-shot” (i.e. shot purely in MOOC fashion and not a class recording). Each video lecture should be around 8 to 10 minutes long, covering a learning point each. Long video covering many points will lose learners and it is not easy to resume learning if you have to take a break while watching a 1 hour lecture.

(c) Tie to (b) a good summary of the learning points to be achieved for the chapter, summarizing the key learning outcomes attained with glossary of new terms / concepts.

(d) A clear and easy to follow assessment regime. I for one is a kind “loner” when it comes to studying. I like discussion forum and will take part even if not required by the assessment regime if the conversation is interesting. I never like to work in a group in which the bulk of the assessment for knowledge attainment is based. In Stanford University’s pioneer “Technology Entrepreneurship” MOOC, I was let down by some of my fellow group members (we were from Malaysia, Singapore, and Pakistan) to the extent that we could not develop our project fully (luckily the assessment system made allowance for such scenario). I think group work should still be used but assessment of which should not occupy a significant chunk of the final grade. I also do not like peer-based-assessment for written work. This is because the system will not have the ability to distinguish the serious peer assessors from those who just want to complete the task and simply assign a grade. In fact, I have an idea: why not engage some of these serious peer reviewers as course monitors (a sort of class representatives) give them some Teaching Assistant’s privileges to “double mark” a group of learners’ work. In return these serious peer assessors can be given some incentives such as free enrollment into verified assessment (i.e Coursera’s Signature Track or edX’s Verified Certificate) which usually cost a fair bit of money especially if you are not earning US dollars like me.

In short, learners’ expectations and what an MOOC promised to deliver must tally. Some MOOCs look good on the introduction page but the content was either not suitable or too demanding of the learner. Some will have unrealistic assessment regime that drives away those who already enrolled.

The “we build it and they will come” expectation of some of the MOOC providers has to be erased from their vocabulary! What happens will likely be this, veteran MOOCers like me will come, even sign up and look around, feeling disappointed and dropout from the course!