Reflection 4: Learning and Knowledge Transfer

Reflection on what I have learned throughout this course and what knowledge has been transferred

The first assignment is my own reflection as a PhD student. This assignment reminds me the old time. Sweet and sour memories recalled for this task. I was fortunate to work with 2 understanding supervisors. They were nice to me and taught me a lot. I can apply their pratice for my supervision. With this assignment, I was able to generate to interview students. The questions asked were based on my own experience too. In a nut shell, the first assignment came at the right time to kick-off the course.

The evidence-based mentoring practice (EMP) assigned in this course has also been beneficial to me as a new lecturer in UUM. It involves a process of identifying issues facing our students and designing a program that can address those issues. Through this EMP project, I become more aware of what problems students are facing in their studies. I also need to think what sort of action we need to do to help them tackling the issues. Without understanding their situations, difficult for me as a supervisor to help them finish their study on the specified time. Furthermore, EMP allows me to apply what I learn in class on the real life i.e. solving students' problem. This service learnig project has its own advantage to make us engage with the community, in this case is the postgraduate students. Working in a team to execute this project was quite enjoying. It is easier for us to do this event virtually instead of face-to-face. However, I feel that virtual talk is not effective as compared to the traditional face-to-face because there is little engagement between the speaker and participants. Perhaps in the future, I will be able to organize a face-to-face talk or workshop to postgraduate students.

A number of things I can reflect from the project. First, almost everyone shares the same challenges in doing PhD/Masters. For many things, I have faced what they are facing. What I need to do is never do something that I did not like when I was a student. I need to help students as much as I can. Helping them does not mean I will do everything for them. They need to write their own theses, but with my guidance InsyaAllah. My aim is to produce high quality students who are not just getting PhD but gain the knowledge.

Second, although there was only a couple of lectures in this course, I did my self-learning through this EMP. I uploaded everything I did on my own e-portfolio. I share my input/knowledge with others and I can read their input too. This is a good practice to make the knowledge publicly available for others to benefit from it. In the future, in my class is small, I would try this e-portfolio style in giving assignments to students because students are not just learning from lecturers but from their friends too. Reading their friends work might give them different perspective pertaining to any issue discussed. I also learn how to use Gibss' Reflective Cycle to reflect on the EMP. This is the first time I heard about it and I find that it is a very useful technique to produce a complete reflection on any event we organise.

During the expert talk given by our distinguished Professor, I was exposed to the dos and don’ts in supervising students. I also learnt the process of supervising in UUM practices, which cannot be easily learned from inexperience supervisors. The Professor also shared her experience with us in supervising different kinds of students. She shared the real cases that happened and how to deal and respond to those cases. Her sharing makes me more confident to supervise students in the coming years. Supervising students is not a straight forward task if we take it seriously. From my own observations in UUM, supervisors tend to accept so many students to meet KPIs and to increase publications taken from students' thesis. This is even worse when the students' topic is not well matched with their expertise. While this is good in some parts, but it has more downsides especially on the time spent to read/check/validate students' work/progress. Reading and providing feedback to their work is extremely important to makesure they are doing the right things and at an acceptable pace. If I have so many students, i.e. more than 2, I would have little time to focus on their work. Hence, from my points of view, having small number of students is a key to being successful in supervising. Unfortunately for me, I haven't received any postgraduate students due to Covid-19 pandemic - they are unable to register their studies in UUM. Hopefully next year I will have students to supervise.