Do you use TikTok? What are your favorite videos? Do you ever post your own? What do you love — or hate — about the app? Let's watch the video below about a TikTok contest.

Read an article and answer the questions.

Don’t patronise our students

JUMPING on the TikTok bandwagon may sound cool to some people but it’s totally strange coming from the Higher Education Ministry. The idea of cosseting our “bored and homesick” university students who have to remain on campus during the movement control order (MCO) period with a competition on video-sharing platform TikTok is simply patronising them. Our higher education students are more capable than that.

As an academic, I feel that this kind of “encouragement” is truly unnecessary in an academic setting. And I have good reason to believe that Makcik Kiah, who has a daughter staying at a local campus, would agree with me too.

Perhaps TikTok is a thing among young people now but it is not education. In Ireland, they have writer John Boyne’s Covid-19 short story (aka isolation diaries) competition. In India, the National Innovation Foundation has opened the Challenge Covid-19 Competition to all citizens, calling for innovations beyond technological ideas related to nutrition and boosting immunity in a time of lockdown. Similarly, South Africa has the Covid-19 Idea Global Challenge, inviting university students to pitch any solutions they develop to any Covid-19-related problem to a panel of international investors and mentors. And in Malaysia, we have... a TikTok competition. We are better than this. We should be better than this.