Monday, December 04, 2006

Other universities under the spotlight

OK, after highlighting the inadequacies of the profile of certain facilitators at KDMC here and here, I thought it would only be fair to examine other universities in Malaysia, both private and public.

(Incidentally, despite alerting the executive director of KMDC, the profiles of their facilitators have not been changed in regards to how they list their qualifications or the description of their job experience)

Over the course of the next few weeks, I'll be looking at the CVs of teaching faculty in selected public and private universities in Malaysia notably the Universty of Nottingham's Malaysian campus, Monash's Sunway campus, MMU, UKM, USM and UM.

From my cursory web searches, these are some of my initial impressions:

1) The qualifications of the teaching faculty in these universities are legit (especially compared to the ones we've seen listed in KDMC)
2) The public universities do not list the full CVs of their teaching faculty (this is standard practice in the US) and that most of the private universities DO list the full CVs of their teaching faculty
3) There is a practice of having Associate Professors who do not have PhDs in both the public and private universities (this is very uncommon in the US although this could be justified if the person in question has an extensive publication record)
4) The private universities listed here do have active research agendas among its teaching faculty

I'll also try to highlight and compare some of the departments which I'm more familiar with and come up with some simple recommendations moving forward.

First up, USM.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

walau...soon most of the unis will hate you two...

Anonymous said...

you can check MMU lecturers' directory at here http://onlinecyber.mmu.edu.my/online/doe/index.jsp
but it's a bit slow for you to access it...good luck.

Anonymous said...

KM,

It is one thing saying one has an 'active' research agenda, it is completely another being commited to it and actually having the infrastructure to do it. I wonder if we can get hold of the recent outcome of the MOSTI grants and see how each university gets off the block.

~

Anonymous said...

The past IRPA and current eScience recipients (2006 probably not updated yet) are all available online.

http://www.mastic.gov.my/

chez1978

Anonymous said...

Dear KM,

I think that almost all of the qualifications of academics in the scrutinized local universities are legit.. The problems in these universities are not the academics' qualifications..but rather their attitude towards imparting quality knowledge to their students as well as research/publication competencies..."sighed" "sighed". Most of them are looking for an easy way of obtaining so-called "international awards" (read: invention gold medals) and thus neglecting their supposedly actual academic work (read: churning out new and thought-provacative ideas)



BTW... I am applying for an Escience fund....perhaps all of you can look out for me..:)

Kian Ming....how do you find time to write these blog entries? Dont you have a phd research to attend to? I certainly dont have that much time....

Anonymous said...

Dear KM,

I think that almost all of the qualifications of academics in the scrutinized local universities are legit.. The problems in these universities are not the academics' qualifications..but rather their attitude towards imparting quality knowledge to their students as well as research/publication competencies..."sighed" "sighed". Most of them are looking for an easy way of obtaining so-called "international awards" (read: invention gold medals) and thus neglecting their supposedly actual academic work (read: churning out new and thought-provacative ideas)



BTW... I am applying for an Escience fund....perhaps all of you can look out for me..:)

Kian Ming....how do you find time to write these blog entries? Dont you have a phd research to attend to? I certainly dont have that much time....

Anonymous said...

Its a bird!......
Its a plane!!....
Its....SUPER KIAN MING and side kick TONY PUA!

Anonymous said...

There are a few points you must consider KM in probing these various universities:

1 Are the papers cited in well known journals. Local proceedings. symposiums should not be creditted

2 Who is the real author in the paper with "...et al" These piggy back riders should not be considered

Anonymous said...

Why dont you go for the professors cv and qualifications first? Dont go for the ikan bilis...go for the sharks!

Anonymous said...

wow.. to do a study on this is like a phd paper itself..

the amnt of data and close scrutiny on their past publication, education, teaching experience, etc. will give u mountains of paperwork to filter through.

good luck!

Anonymous said...

I must agree with anon above in that there is just too much effort required. Maybe KM wants to have some experience as project leader and delegate the work across the globe?
Having said that, I had a look at Nottingham and Monash some months ago and very much doubt if there is fake qualification there. Was unable to get hold of info at UTAR though, which makes it rather difficult to assess its ambitions.

~

Anonymous said...

I agree it is unlikely that the degrees of lecturers in the universities that KM selected above are not legitimate.

For those who are interested, all the degrees of UTAR staff including academic & administrative officers are listed in the prospectus that is given to all students that apply for entry to UTAR. Application for new admissions for the January intake has just started. It should be quite easy to get such a copy from the PJ office. Good luck!

Richard G.

WY said...

KMDC doesn't seems to be a tertiary education institution. Their academic offering includes distance learning, professional certifications and basic courses on management/business. All the "degree/post-grad deg" offered are also based on distance/work learning. Hence, I am not surprised that its faculty members are not your typical academics.

ps: US way of doing things is not necessary the right way. :D