My Critical Reflection on the Issues

Tracking back to the initiative made by Ministry of Higher Education on the plan to introduce the ‘soft skills’ modules for all undergraduates of Malaysian public universities on June 2006; and up-to-date, university’s key-persons obviously aware of the latest higher education policy; and every members/profilers in the education field should be aware and ready for this implementation. The issue of ‘not aware’ of this exercise should not rise in mass audience.

Hopefully, to this date, lecturers (would be assessor) should be aware that they hold the padlock to the students future potential for employment. The 8th week for assessing period is just around the corner.

Are the lecturers (would be assessor) ready?
Given the short notice to UMLIC to train UM lecturers to teach and assess final year undergraduate students for soft skills competency is not an easy job. It requires careful plan and cooperation from all parties involved. Given a short time for awareness and training, what the committee able to do is organize a one-day workshop which is compulsory for all lecturers to attend. Like Dr. Raja Maznah said, it’s a band-aid situation. Try to cover as much as they can in order to achieve the target by the 12th week of Semester 2 session. Hopefully through the workshops, lecturers gain as much as information and able to assess their students justifiably (the future of UM products is at stake). The workshops and break-down facilitating is a good approach for a short term plan; such as the case above.

How about the long run?
Big issue: implementing the exercise in UM environment and the continuation of this exercise for a longer term.
To ensure the successful of this exercise, awareness and understanding from involved parties such as lecturers and students are essential. Here are few suggestions on methods and tools to implement the exercise:

Conduct training / workshops for lecturers (would be assessor) – make it compulsory for all lecturers (as part of staff development program)
- Implementing classroom based / non-classroom based project in the teaching
- customize curriculum / syllabus (stand-alone, embedded or integrated soft skills content in syllabus)
- establish understanding of lecturers on this exercise

Educate the students on developing soft skills on oneself à through classroom, projects and community involvement.

Awareness program to the undergrads from the first year (nurturing from the start) à not only because of being evaluate through out the studies, but equip one-self with the necessary soft skills (in order to excel, for self achievement and complement industry demand)

Soft Skills Development Community – forming collaboration between experts, partners’ universities, public and private institutions and corporate sector. Collaboration from different parties may expand views and approaches on helping to develop soft skills competency of UM students.

Soft Skills Online portal which can be access by lecturers (staffs) and students
- Related articles on soft skills
- Training modules
- Pre-test and soft skills competency assessment – online evaluation
- Forums
- Discussions
- Continuous monitoring and supervising by steering community
- Collaboration with other institutions (universities or evaluation bodies)
- Further enhancement involving industry and corporate sector

Implementation of soft skills development in university requires proper planning, design, development and continuous evaluation to make it better. Due to that, as part of UM community, myself and team members are currently designing approach to enable all parties involved can get information from online source, means to be able to download materials, modules, articles, sharing information and for online assessment. We are also hoping that the suggested online portal will serve as a common ground for everyone to communicate and exchange ideas on soft skills development.


*** Welcome any feedback on my perceptions and reflections. ;-)