TESL POWER HSBM: PROF DATO’ DR MOHAMED AMIN EMBI

Monday, May 8, 2017

PROF DATO’ DR MOHAMED AMIN EMBI

You can see this as a shout-out to Prof Dato' Dr Mohamed Amin Embi...

One of the qualities I admire about him is his hard work and dedication in the teaching field, in going the extra mile to give the best for all the educators out there. For your information, I joined his online course, Rethinking Teaching; Redesigning Learning, which is offered in Openlearning.com, in June 2016 and completed the course in December 2016 (7 months). As an online learner, it is truly amazing to see how committed and passionate he is when it comes to teaching and learning. He does not mind sharing his valuable knowledge and useful educational online resources for free; most of his own works are published in Scribd and Slideshare where educators from all over the world are able to access them. He also introduces various free online tools that can be utilised by educators in making a difference in the way teaching and learning can be carried out.

The course that he has designed has led me to reflect and rethink of my own teaching and the lessons I carried out in class. It gets me to identify and explore different ideas and perspectives in the process of teaching and learning by looking at various possibilities of engaging learners in meaningful learning activities. His creative and innovative touch in designing and presenting the contents in the course modules drives me to find out and explore more on my own. It is really interesting and fun to explore the online tools that he recommends which come with selected quality videos on how to use them. He also inspires and motivates his online learners (educators) to keep on learning and relearning. Even though he has a big number of online students from different countries, he is able to get each of his learners enchanted and hooked on learning as he consistently maintains his interactions with them. I personally felt motivated and engaged throughout the completion of the course because of his prompt reply to the comments I made and the selective likes or kudos I got.

As an English language teacher with 15 years of teaching experience and teaching English language for Malaysian University English Test (MUET) (from 2010 onwards), I have already started the transformation in my teaching approach while I was doing the course and also after I have completed the online course. I tried blended learning approach by integrating online and traditional learning as suggested by Prof Amin. This is because there were some shortcomings when I only relied on the conventional way in teaching the English language for MUET. One of the main problems I had to face was students’ lack of interest in my lessons. After I changed my approach in teaching I could see great improvement in my students’ learning attitude as they were more interested and engaged in the learning process. In addition, their MUET results improved. You can see some snapshots of my own virtual classroom and some of the online tools that I have utilised to design my own online lessons in 2017 (Four components in MUET- Listening, Speaking, Reading & Writing) and some of the activities I have conducted with my students to further illustrate the impacts of Rethinking Teaching; Redesigning Learning have on me as a professional educator. I am still learning and although I have already completed the online course in 2016, I keep going back to the course modules for reference until now as they are really useful.