eLearning @ HBP – A Success Story
by
School of Housing, Building and Planning
Universiti Sains Malaysia
The School of HBP has had a long history in the use of computers for teaching and learning. Back in the 1970s and early 80s, students had to take a compulsory computer programming paper where we (as HBP students then) had to learn the intricacies of the Fortran language using punchcards (If you are under 20 years of age you have probably never heard of computer punchcards). Most students did not find any satisfaction in taking the course. Later we were able to carry out the programming through terminals at the Computer Centre. By the mid 1980s, HBP had purchased a Tektronics Graphic Terminal which was connected by a phone line from HBP to the USM Computer Centre (a walking distance of only 5 minutes). Dr. Wong Poh Kam (who is now Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore) was the man behind this effort. However, the technology was primitive with a green screen and rudimentary graphics. It took about 45 minutes for the terminal to draw a simple pie chart using the computing power of the mainframe computer at the Computer Centre. Wong used to joke that he would set the machine to start plotting then go off for coffee. When he came back the computer would still be hard at work. Of course, this would still make sense if you had several thousand records of data from a survey and wanted the statistical software to generate a chart for analysis.
In the later part of 1980s, HBP bought a powerful workstation (called Apollo Domain) with accompanying proprietary CAD software developed by a university in England. Despite the intensive training given to staff, the system was not very popular and was eventually abandoned.
Then came Kamaruddin Mohd Nor (or Dino) who is an expert in CAD and PCs. He set up a PC lab especially for CAD at HBP. These PCs had only very small harddisks and an incredibly small amount of RAM. Many of the computers ran on two floppy drives only. You would insert a bootup disk in drive A to start the computer. When you wanted to use a particular software, you would insert the floppy diskette with the software (such as a word processor or statistical package) in drive A and launch the program by typing the execute file at the command prompt. The floppy drive B was typically used for storing data. In those days, a normal PC had only 640 kilobytes of RAM (yes, kilo not mega) and the clockspeed was sub-100 Mhz (33 or 66 Mhz compared to 600 – 800 Mhz for the high-end Pentium III and more than 1 gigahetz in the latest Pentium IV computers). But Dino had a falling-out with the establishment and migrated south back to Universiti Teknologi Malaysia in the early 1990s. During his tenure, he proposed a Macintosh Lab for HBP and it was approved by the Vice Chancellor based on the promise shown by KAiSEL (Kamus Istilah Elektronik) which was developed by a group of HBP lecturers. When Dino left, the Mac Lab died a natural death (but some claim that it was suffocated to death).
Computing at HBP then changed leadership several times.
In 1995, a group of lecturers (two of them fresh from their Ph.D.s) decided to ride the Internet revolution. Dr. Alias Abdullah (now Associate Professor at Universiti Islam Antarabangsa Malaysia), Dr. Lee Lik Meng (now also Associate Professor but a diehard HBP faculty who has so far succeeded in staying put at HBP) and Mohd Yahaya Mohd Daud (now Chairman for IT at HBP) took on the task of creating the official HBP Web site. They had no prior experience either in the creation of web pages or in setting up and managing a website. With generous help from the systems analysts at the School of Computer Science as well as the Computer Centre (Zulklifi and Zamri), the daring trio hardcoded each web page and set up HBP’s first website. Some HBP technicians helped with the scanning of photographs using borrowed equipment. We were the first School (other then Computer Science) to create, setup and manage our own website. Other Schools followed and even copied our format for Academic Staff Profile. Unlike the luxury of web publishing tools available today, we had to use a text-editor to key in all the TAGs in the HTML documents. If you don’t know what TAGS are, you don’t have to worry. You will probably never have to know because you will be using sophisticated What-You-See-What-You-Get (WYSWYG) web authoring software. Our web server was a very modest Power Macintosh with only 16 Megabytes of RAM. Performance was very low (it often had to be rebooted) but we were extremely proud of it. At the end of 1995, HBP again made its mark when a group of M.Sc. Planning students under the guidance of Lee and Alias created the Malaysian Town Planning website which was lauched by the Chief Minister of Penang in conjunction with the Silver Jubilee Celebration of the Town Planning Profession in Malaysia.
After that, there was not much in terms of development of the HBP website. Security on the web server was non-existent. It was susceptible to mischief from within the faculty since anyone could just walk right up to the server and do as he pleases. Several instances of unauthorised changes to the web pages were detected including an incident where some lecturers’ profile were allegedly amended leading to protests not only from outside campus but at the School Board concerning lecturers who where not entitled to specific professional titles conferred by law. (Do you know that you are not entitled to call yourself an “architect” or “town planner” unless you are registered with the respective Board created by law?). There was also an instance where someone tried to claim dubious ownership of the web.
HBP was very proactive in setting up the web and to the University’s credit, the Administration did not discourage us. In some local universities, you would have to write in for prior approval if you wanted to set up a website. But they finally caught up with us and not surprisingly, instructions were eventually received from the Administration to print a hardcopy of the entire website to be submitted for vetting. Needless to say, we were aghast but the media was still new and the administrators were not familiar the concept of being online. Even though the USM Administration was weary of the content they were nevertheless proud of our achievement (as you will see later).
About a year later, a brand new HP Unix box with 64 Megabytes of RAM was bought and delivered with much expectation of improved services on our web. Unfortunately, even with experts from the University and the supplier, we were not successful in migrating the web to the Unix machine (then again, perhaps it was not intended to be a web server).
At about that time, Lee was asked to prepare a paper for the establishment of an Urban Planning Lab. The paper identified not only software and hardware requirements but courses which should be taught using relevant information technology such as GIS, CAD, electronic spreadsheets, databases and statistical packages. The ideas never got pass the Planning Programme Committee.
After rolling along (some say “languishing”, depending on whose point of view) for about 3 years, the website began to be reenergised in mid-1998. Under the new leadership of Professor Ghani Salleh who returned as Dean of HBP, a proposal was made by Lee to proactively use the web to promote the use of information technology in teaching and learning at HBP. The primary objective was to encourage lecturers to embrace the web for simple tasks like publishing lecture notes and schedules as a prelude to more sophisticated uses such as integrating information technology into teaching of methods courses and studio.
As with most public universities, funding is scarce but more than that, the environment in campus was not conducive and did not encourage the academic staff to be innovative mainly because of the apparent lack of infostructure. USM has had a policy and even a blueprint to encourage lecturers to embark on the development of Computer Aided Instructions /Computer Based Learning (CAI-CBL) for 10 years. A modest target of 10 percent of courses to be developed into CAI-CBL has never been achieved. The University has recognised that this approach has failed mainly because of the immense amount of effort as well as skills required to undertake such projects. In addition, lecturers saw little benefit in such projects because of perceived lack of recognition and credit for promotions to professors. Fortunately, these issues are slowly being addressed and remedied.
On the other hand, there were lecturers who were totally committed to all things IT. Some had developed their own websites for teaching but have had to be parked at numerous free web-hosting sites around the world because of lack of resources in campus. Wan Burhanuddin was one of those very much aggrieved but happily he is now “home” at HBP.
With a mandate and instructions for Ghani, Lee set into motion various actions to push the use of web by HBP lecturers and students. One of the first actions was to open up Internet access for students (on the Dean’s instructions). HBP was the first School to freely allow students to access the Internet from the School’s IT Lab. Some Schools did even allow the students to check email from their computer labs. Time slots could be booked for one of the 5 Internet PCs and the students could check email, surf the web and even do chat. Very soon, the IT Lab became the favourite hang-out.
The second action was to prepare a proposal and budget to utilise HBP’s considerable reservoir of Consultancy-derived funds to acquire hardware and software for this project. The budget was sanctioned by the School Board and approved by the Director for Innovation and Consultancy (Prof. Gan Ee Kiang) but went through a protracted justification process at the University level. However, with the unequivocal support of the Director of the USM Computer Centre (Alias Yusof), the University eventually approved the funding. The acquisition of the hardware took just as long and it was some 8 months after the project paper was submitted before the equipment was finally delivered.
In the meantime, with zero knowledge of servers and its software, the HBP Team had to improvise. Firstly, it was decided that we abandon the Power Macintosh because of problems with security. We unhesitatingly adopted the Windows NT platform because of its reported ease of use, lower cost (both in hardware and academic pricing for the software) as well as its compatibility with the lecturers’ Windows-based personal computers issued by the University.
While waiting for the budget to be approved, we decided to “hijack” a new Pentium MMX 200 Mhz PC with 32 Megabytes of RAM (later upgraded to 64 MB) and asked USM’s Information Technology Centre (ITC) systems analyst (Simon Wong) to load Windows NT for a trial, a provision under the licensing agreement. As a standalone webserver (which we nicknamed HBPSentral) however, we could not implement the ideas for lecturers to independently publish their website without intervention from the IT Lab staff. One of our objectives was to inculcate a culture amongst lecturers to use IT for their teaching through creation and self-publication of their own webbased teaching materials (without having to ask typists or technical staff to do the chores). In this way, we hoped to create a groundswell of IT-skilled lecturers who will collectively contribute to a constantly evolving dynamic HBP web site that will make visitors come back for more because there will always be something new in the content.
After extensive reading of the Windows NT documentation, it was decided that another computer would have to be sacrificed as a Primary Domain Controller to secure access by individual lecturers to the web server from their office PCs. This time around, the HBP Team undertook the in-house setting up of the server and succeeded after several attempts, including having to reformat the harddisk several times. For the creation of web pages we adopted Frontpage 97 and installed the Frontpage Server Extensions on the webserver to facilate direct publishing by lecturers using Frontage. Each lecturer managed his own subweb with a login account. Thus, July 1998 saw the beginning a new era in the use of IT for teaching and learning not only at HBP but the USM Campus.
With the infostructure in place, the HBP Team (essentially the HBP IT Committee) began aggressive marketing to the faculty. A constant stream of email inviting participation and reporting progress was sent to all lecturers. Unsuspecting lecturers where waylaid in the general office and along the corridors where they were constantly but politely badgered with the question : “When are you going to start your web?”. Personal invitations where extended to specific lecturers. IT Clinics were organised to inform and to train the lecturers. Any lecturer showing the slightest sign of interest was immediately (whenever possible) issued a login account and subweb without hassle (no paperwork, no bureaucracy). Amongst the pioneers who took up the challenge were Dr. Ahmad Sanusi Hassan, Dr. Ghafar Ahmad, Dr. Nurwati Badarulzaman and Abdul Naser Abdul Ghani. With a lot of patience and perseverance, these lecturers managed to create the websites and in turn became models for the rest to emulate. Many others followed and the University and the rest of the Campus started to take notice.
In a very short time, HBP’s use of the web for teaching and learning had made an impact in the campus. HBP was given the honour of having its eLearning website launched by the Deputy Prime Minister in conjunction with USM’s 30th Anniversary Celebration in mid-1999. On the day before the celebrations, Lee approached Professor Baharudin Salleh, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) with a view towards further marketing HBP’s webbased learning. Baharudin responded by saying “I know. I have been monitoring your website everyday.” Those remarks from the University’s top management was an acknowledgment that the University was taking notice. But the icing on the cake was surely the appointment of HBP by the University Administration to produce the multimedia presentation for the launching of the celebrations. A University level Team led by Dr. Badaruddin Mohamed from HBP astound the audience with a state-of-the-art presentation produced entirely with digital multimedia. A key to the success of this project was the countless hours spent in front of the computer workstations by HBP students who had acquired the skills through projects undertaken as part of their HBP coursework.
At about this time, the HP Net Server (a Pentium II 350Mhz machine with 256 MB RAM) was delivered. Though the performance of our web services improved considerably, we were soon overwhelmed by the traffic and quickly ran out of diskspace.
In November 1999, HBP was again officially recognised for its achievements in webbased learning, being conferred the University’s Quality Award for excellence in the use of IT for teaching and learning. HBP was recognised not for the work and accomplishment of one individual but the collective impact of innovative use of IT by many lecturers working for a common goal. A presentation of HBP’s approach in using IT for teaching and learning was made by Lee during the award ceremony and Baharudin followed up by asking all Schools to emulate HBP’s lead. Riding on this success, the University invited HBP to participate at the eLearning 2000 Exhibition at the Putra World Trade Centre, Kuala Lumpur together with ITC, Off-Campus and the Library. The HBP WebTeam conducted mini-eLectures at the trade centre through online access to lecture materials published on the HBP website. Members of HBP WebTeam who participated included Lee, Yahaya, Yoke Mui, Wan Burhanuddin, Aldrin, Azizi and Sanusi. The Team also made special presentations to the Schools of Industrial Technology and Social Science to propagate webbased learning in campus.
Where Are We?
The School of HBP has slightly over 50 lecturers. Between 20 and 25 of them are actively using the web for teaching and learning and constantly updating the contents. Many others have started their websites but have not given sufficient priority or energy into developing the sites. Others still question whether their efforts will be given due credit during promotions.
eLearning of course, is not merely about the use of web to publish lecture notes and schedules. HBP has experimented with numerous features to enhance the learning experience. Students now routinely produce and publish reports in web format for assignments and studio project. A post-graduate student has also used the web extensively to source for references and has published the entire thesis through the web. Electronic discussion forums, feedback sites, and the use of electronic groups are now common media for instruction at HBP.
At HBP our goal is to integrate IT into teaching and learning. Students are now encouraged to produce their studio reports entirely in electonic format (i.e. no hardcopies) and to integrate relevant technology such as GIS, statistical packages, databases, CAD, animation and so on in their projects. In line with the goals of active learning, students scour the web for references and must take an independent approach in pursuit of knowledge. The flow of information is now tri-directional : from professor to students; from students to professors; and from students to students
Semester II of the 2000/2001 Academic Year marked another milestone for use of IT in teaching and learning when Dr. Badaruddin Mohamad and Lee implemented a live planning studio project where students successfully integrated various technology into the project including GIS, databases, statistical packages and web publishing, right from day one of the semester. Their experience in this project will be reported in a separate paper.
Apart from the names already mentioned, there are many lecturers who may or may not have a HBP website but are nonetheless making their small IT revolutions through use of web or merely requiring students to use electronic spreadsheets and multimedia presentations. They include Dr. Linariza Harun, Abu Hassan, Nora’zam Shuib, Associate Professor Zulkifli Hanafi, Dr. Norizal, Zahry, Yeoh, Associate Professor Mohd Talhah, Aziz Hussein, Wan Mariah and Dr. Rahmat Azam. Even the current Dean (Associate Professor Abdul Majid) is an experienced web-author and publisher. They each make individual contributions but it is time that effort is coordinated to achieve a high goal.
We have not only encouraged the majority of lecturers to embrace the web and information technology but are particularly proud of the new breed of students and graduates who despite initial setbacks have excelled in integrating IT into their academic work and inculcated a culture of excellence in their pursuit of knowledge. Many graduates and even current students have joined the e-economy as entrepreneurs or hold positions in multinational companies because of their skills as knowledge workers.
Where Do We Go From Here?
It is true that eLearning has immense potential as the new medium for distance learning with the ability to reach a large number of students with almost no physical limit in terms of geographical reach. It definitely can enhance the learning experience but it will not totally replace the benefits of interaction between professors and students in an academic environment. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has committed millions of dollars to embark on a project to place 30,000 lectures and course modules on the web for free within the next 5 years. Of course, the students of these free materials will not get an MIT degree nor benefit from the academic interaction on campus but offerring its treasure trove of knowledge to the rest of the world makes a profound statement that education is a right of every human being and a responsibility of every educational institution which cannot be measured in tuition fees collected or revenue generated.
In the Strategic Plan formulated in March 2001, eLearning is identified as one of the major goals of the School of HBP. Ideas for the eStudio and the use of Lotus LearningSpace for teaching have been initiated including a promotional seminar conducted by Associate Professors Shukri Suleiman and Muhammad Rafei from ITC for HBP lecturers in April 2001. HBP lecturers are committed to push the eLearning frontier in campus. The question is whether the University has committed enough resources in terms of funding for infostructure and development to make it a success? After several unsuccessful attempts to acquire eLearning software, the University in early 2001 eventually approved in principle a pilot project to purchase a web-based system which would provide tools found in most eLearning applications. However, the effort was temporarily aborted when there was pressure to channel the funds for in-house development instead. We support funding to nurture USM’s in-house talent but we would also like to see aggressive results-oriented programmes even with the limited resources available.
So far, HBP has focussed mainly on encouraging lecturers to embrace the web and IT. These efforts are however dependent on the initiatives and leanings of the individual lecturers. Some are diehard IT advocates and all their students must follow the e-path. Others however are content with leaving anything to do with IT to the others who care. HBP and the rest of the campus must undertake a comprehensive review of the curriculum which will identify courses which must be conducted in an e-environment. For example Planning Studio must integrate GIS and Architecture Studios must utilise CAD and so on. This of course will required immense amounts of funds but the alternative will be there will be no uniformity or consistency in the quality of graduates in terms of IT skills. At HBP we are not content with graduates who know have to use email only.
To make it attractive for lecturers to retool themselves to be relevant for eLearning, annual assessments and evaluation criteria for promotions to associate professors and professors must give adequate weightage for course materials and publications in e-media. The current cap on weightage is too low to make a significant impact in encouraging lecturers publish electronically. A lecturer would get more weightage writing text books for secondary schools compared to producing CAI/CBL courseware for university level courses.
USM annually spents a large sum of money (several hundred thousand) subscribing to online databases with access to full text of journal articles. As a policy, the University will approve the publication of e-journals by the Schools in USM. However, at the School level, there is still some lingering doubts about publishing e-journals. Lee had the benefit of a chat with the USM Chief Librarian (Puan Rasidah Begum) at Putrajaya who has whole-heartedly embraced e-journals and e-books. However, the USM Press has yet to respond positively to our proposal to produce two ebooks. eLearning can only be effective if the reference materials are readily accessible through the web or through ebook readers. As it is, the majority of the students are unable to comprehend the overwhelming English literature not only on the web but in printed form. With our own publications through e-journals and ebooks, we will not only contribute content in both English and Malay but at the same time encourage lecturers to publish electronically because of the weightage behind these publications (as peered reviewed articles or books subject to the editorial sanction of USM Press). This will further serve to drive the eLearning agenda.
The infrastructure is largely in place. Each lecturer has a Pentium III PC connected to a highspeed network which will be running at Gigabits throughout the campus. Students in the hostel will have access to the campus network through wireless technology. What needs to be upgraded are the IT Labs with greater number of PCs on the network and relevant software. This will be the most difficult to accomplish because of constantly improving and evolving technology.
Finally, HBPdotCom. A dream from a night of pizza at Bangsar during the eLearning 2000 expendition. In the fallout from the dotcom meltdown, HBPdotCom is taking a respite. Rest assured, when the time is right, we will forge forward.
The success HBP has achieved has been due not to the effort of just one person pushing a dream. That dream was shared by many but in particular the CEO (Dean) was crucial in his firm support as well as his success in putting HBP’s web agenda on the University’s agenda.
Much more needs to be done and for the next academic year (2001/2002) and a new Team is in place to chart new territories while Lee rejuvenates for nine months. Good luck, see you all in March 2002.
1 HBP website – http://www.hbp.usm.my/
2 KAiSEL web – http://www.hbp.usm.my/kaisel/
3 Malaysian Town Planning website – http://www.hbp.usm.my/townplg/
Written for Buletin PBP (May 2001)
Thursday, 14 June 2001
hosted at http://www.hbp.usm.my/ITSupport/
Footnote : This article generated a minor
controversy concerning “who deserves what credits”. This article is not about credits but you are welcome to read, to
analyse, to critique, to form your own conclusions and hopefully, write your
own version for publication.