Curtin lecturers receive excellence award
MIRI: Curtin University, Malaysia ( Curtin Malaysia) senior lecturer in marketing Dr Shamsul Kamariah Abdullah and her counterpart at Curtin University’s main campus in Perth, Dr Aneeshta Gunness, are joint recipients of the ‘ Programmes That Enhance Learning for Curtin Business School’ Award.
The award was presented recently at Curtin Perth by Curtin Business School ( CBS) for excellence in the delivery of their Retail Marketing & Distribution unit using Distributed Learning ( DL) pedagogy.
Curtin Malaysia in a statement said DL provides students in both campuses the opportunity to study the unit simultaneously through live web conferencing. Virtual cross- cultural teamwork is applied in DL where students join as a team across campuses to complete a retail plan as one of the assessments for the unit.
The Retail Marketing & Distribution unit is a core unit of the Bachelor of Commerce ( Marketing) programme offered across the Malaysia and Perth campuses. The programme which was piloted in 2014 has since become an ongoing initiative.
According to Dr Shamsul, DL enables the students to experientially link and acquaint themselves with cultures they are initially unfamiliar with. The students are trained to understand their cross- cultural differences and therefore develop their cultural intelligence.
Dr Aneeshta, who is the unit controller, added that technology is a key component in DL and designing the appropriate curricular activities and aligning them with the strengths of DL is instrumental in delivering true value to students.
She said that whilst international experience remains an added value of DL, it is supported by the activities conducted during the unit’s weekly 2-hour workshops that promote active application of retailing theory, higher level thinking, collaboration, interaction and communication.
In DL, student teams tackle various case studies and share their findings synchronously using the DL infrastructure. They also use virtual collaborative platforms such as Group Map and Facebook to discuss the case studies assigned to them. They use Group Map to upload their thoughts which are captured in real time during the workshops.
Both Dr Shamsul and Dr Aneeshta agreed that the use of DL has greatly improved the working relationship between the two campuses, as well as helped enhance professional practices and improved the students’ overall learning experience.
The use of DL at Curtin University’s campuses is aligned to its belief that the capacity to build bi- directional links in both teaching and research are the hallmarks of a genuine global university.
Curtin is now recognised as being among the top two per cent of universities in the world and Australia’s second most international university. The university was recently named as the biggest Australian mover in the prestigious Nature rankings and the most collaborative of all Australian universities.