Research Team Awarded UNESCO Grant

An OUM research team has won a UNESCO grant to prepare a report on technology and education in Malaysia. The sole recipient from Malaysia, the team has been given a RM40,000 funding.

The team comprises Prof Dr Santhi Raghavan from the Faculty of Business and Management, Assoc Prof Dr Nantha Kumar Subramaniam, Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Technology and Applied Sciences, and OUM President/Vice-Chancellor, Prof Dr Ahmad Izanee Awang.

They will be conducting a case study for the report, which will be included in the 2023 Global Education Monitoring (GEM): Southeast Asia Regional Report.

The GEM Report is an editorially independent, evidence-based annual report hosted and published by UNESCO. Focusing on monitoring education in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, it has commissioned 11 country case studies: Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam.

Each country case study is expected to provide a comprehensive analysis of education challenges to which technology can potentially contribute and essential conditions that need to be met for the potential to be realised.

Said Prof Santhi, “We are honoured to have won such a generous and prestigious funding from UNESCO. We shall be working in two different fields (technology and education) in a large-scale empirical, scientific and psychologically-oriented research, employing both qualitative and quantitative methodologies.”

Added Dr Nantha, who will lead the project, “We are reaching out to stakeholders at the federal and local levels through broad-based consultations and questionnaires to collect and strengthen information on the target groups. These insights will help us to understand and appraise the current status on the application of technology for teaching and learning and recommend ways for improvements”.

OUM President/Vice-Chancellor Prof Izanee, who will co-research the project, was elated when the University secured the funding for this research project. He said, “Even in disciplines in which research is inexpensive, capturing a grant is increasingly being espoused as an index to judge academics and universities for ranking purposes. Academics all know that we must publish or perish for scholarly survival.

“This project will enable us to understand how technology is applied in higher education institutions and schools by exploring access to equity and inclusion issues in the Malaysian education sector. It will also provide a more comprehensive and evidence-based report on the digital skills of learners and teachers.”