COMMENTS: Set up a National Council for Education Technology

By Lim Kit Siang
Mar 2007

The Government should set up a National Council for Education Technology (NCET) comprising representatives from the National Union of Teaching Profession (NUTP), educationists and academicians with the responsibility of proposing a strategy to raise the general level of information technology capability in schools and colleges as well as develop a new pedagogy for education as IT has brought about a new vision for education reform.

In the traditional classrooms, teachers transmit an established body of knowledge to students, who are judged by their ability to absorb and repeat the basic skills and facts conveyed to them. But in the new, IT-reform model, students and teachers alike embark on more open-ended inquiry. Instead of being expected to master a body of established knowledge, students assume more responsibility for setting their own educational goals, and they must develop skills to seek, sift and analyse information in pursuit of these objectives.

The idea of a “student-centred” or “inquiry-centred” learning will gain added impetus as the economy evolved from the mass production model of the 20th century to the 21st Information Age model.

Knowledge is changing so rapidly that teaching an established body of facts if of little value. What is more important in the Information Age is to give students the skills to go on learning throughout their lives.

This is why I would like to reiterate the DAP proposal made during the debate on the 1996 Education Bill that computer literacy should be made a compulsory core subject for all primary and secondary schools. I call on the Cabinet to make a bold decision to make IT literacy a core curriculum subject for all primary and secondary schools to pave the way for Malaysia’s quantum leap into the Information Age in the new millennium, and for it to be the first amendment to the 1996 Education Act.

Furthermore, the NCET should propose a strategy as to how the government could carry out a crash programme to make the 250,000 teachers in the primary and secondary schools IT-literate by the year 2,000, as well as to learn the new pedagogy to use IT creatively.

The time has come for the government to launch a special loan scheme to encourage and provide an incentive to teachers to buy a personal computer and get special discount to get connected to the Internet.

Telecommunication companies, like Telekoms, should be required to emulate the example of their counterparts in other countries and contribute to the IT development for schools and universities in Malaysia, by devoting a portion of its colossal profits - which was an most unprecedented RM2.38 billion in profit before tax for the financial year ending December 31 last year - in a public-spirited and co-operative initiative with the government to build a Superhighway for Education with more advanced backbone networks capable of supporting high-speed communications services and to put all schools and teachers online by the year 2,000.

In this connection, there are many other areas of legitimate concern of teachers and parents which deserve proper attention from the government.

Firstly, concerns about corruption, abuses of power, accountability and transparency when implementing expensive programmes of introducing IT to the schools. In the past, whenever big educational programmes are launched from Kuala Lumpur, a lot of people made money at the expense of the students and the community.

The NUTP had once found, for instance, that schools in Perak spent millions of ringgit to buy second-hand computers after a Japanese firm had given free overseas junkets to representatives of parent-teacher associations, without realising that computers do not work without programmes. Although the NUTP had reported the matter to the Anti-Corruption Agency, there was no follow-up whatsoever.

As “smart” schools now promoted by the Education Ministry will change the way teachers teach, the way students learn, the type of resources used and the way learning is assessed, teachers are worried how students will be evaluated and assessed. Until all schools are upgraded to “smart schools”, will students in the regular schools have a big disadvantage in answering examination questions that will be application-oriented rather than factual-oriented.