Asia Pacific Journal of Contemporary Education and Communication Technology

14-26

Authors: Siddiqua Aamir, Ebtesam Ahmad Tallouzi, Maura A. E. Pilotti, Khadija El Alaoui

General Self-Efficacy (GSE) scales are used to measure the extent to which individuals possess a general sense of mastery that is not tied to a specific situation or behavior. The present study assesses whether the language in which a GSE scale is presented yields different responses in Arabic-English bilingual female students and whether differences can be traced to emotional reactions triggered by cultural norms dictating modesty in attitudes and behavioral expression. Female students residing in the Eastern Province of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia completed the New General Self-Efficacy (NGSE) scale and reported the valence and intensity of their reactions to each of the statements of the scale. The English version of NGSE produced higher scores than the Arabic version. Because arousal was either minimally related to NGSE scores (English version) or not related at all (Arabic version), the higher reported arousal of the English version may be due to the lower automaticity with which a second language is processed. For the English version, the higher the NGSE scores, the more positive was the emotional response to the statements of the scale, whereas for the Arabic version, the higher the NGSE scores, the less positive was the emotional response. If disapproval of the individualistic, self-focused approach of the NGSE scale is inferred from the valence of participants’ reactions, the results of the present investigation are consistent with the notion that Arabic can trigger cultural codes of modesty.

36-61

Authors: Hessah Al-Dossary

This research explores the most prominent factor that leads to high employee turnover and leads to dissatisfaction with the working environment. I conducted the self-assessment in order to check whether the school meets the standard that it should be at or not. I conducted this by giving the employees a protocol that has some questions about the school. This questionnaire is adopted from Massachusetts Cultural Council. It is an ethnographical research which uses mixed methods design and associate qualitative, along with quantitative data analysis. I used three techniques namely observation, interview and document analysis. The aim of this study is to design a program to reduce the rate of employee turnover at Ajad School through orientation training. This will help to reduce job tardiness as it will facilitate increased job satisfaction, better understanding of employee’s roles and thus, improve their job performance. Overall, results revealed a deficiency in proper training of new employees. Lack of orientation training meant that employees were unaware of their job descriptions, their duties and what was expected of them. As a result, the employees found it difficult to accomplish basic tasks, were dissatisfied with their work and the company and this greatly affected their performance. Lack of orientation training was, as such, the cause for the high employee turnover in the school.

78-88

Authors: Azila Ahmad Sarkawi, Alias Abdullah, Norimah Md. Dali

Amongst the 57 members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference’s (OIC) countries, Malaysia is at number one rating in the Islamicity Index, Islamic Index of Wellbeing and Global Muslim Travel Index studies. The rating gave the impression of the liveability or wellbeing in Malaysia within the Islamic sphere. This recognition prompts the study on the indicators of wellbeing that Malaysia has focused on Islamic dimensions. Consequently, content analysis was done on six selected government documents namely the Malaysian Wellbeing Index, the Malaysian Family Wellbeing Index, the Malaysian Urban-Rural National Indicators Network for Sustainable Development, the Malaysian Shariah Index, the Malaysian Ummah Development Index and the Muslim Religiosity and Personality Indexing. The study found that the first three documents embodied indirect religious dimensions in their wellbeing indexing while the latter three have direct religious dimensions. The incorporation of the religious dimensions into the Malaysia’s wellbeing indexing either directly or indirectly shows the relevancy of the religious factor to human wellbeing. Noticeably, the indicators promulgated under each study are organizationally-driven aiming at attaining their specific objectives that invariably led to variations amongst the agencies. Nonetheless, religion has been found to command a significant factor in the wellbeing of Malaysian though different indicators have been used by the six organizations to arrive at this fact.

100-116

Authors: Ven. Mediyawe Piyarathana Thero

The objective of this research paper is to share the vision on Buddhist Philosophy of Education. At the time of the Buddha, the education system was considered mainly as a religious one, although the education concept was a pre-Buddhist one. The main objective of the Buddha was not to introduce an education system to the world; however, The Buddha was really a religious teacher who introduced a practical and living philosophy to the entire human community. Since Buddha was a person who understood reality fully as an Enlightened One, he introduced a living philosophy targeting the entire human beings through various teaching methods. It is possible to explore the Buddhist Philosophy of Education by exploring the teachings of the Buddha. Educability is accepted in Buddhism at a great level as a principle. The Buddhism emphasizes in the Eight-Fold Path that volition and try, enthusiasm and courage are necessary factors. The way a person should act to end demerit and for the improvement of merit is given under Four Great Efforts. Educability is not a possibility to receive from a religion, not accepting the potentiality of person. The Buddhism has emphasised through many discourses that a person has to achieve objectives without resorting to any external elements. From the teachings of the Buddha, educability and potential energy of a person have been included as essential components in Buddhist Philosophy on Education. According to Buddhism, personality can be presented as the only strength that a person possesses to act with volition and self-confidence. Buddhism first teaches person to create good conduct by disciplining the organs like body, speech etc. then advises for his spiritual development. The personality of the one who has become an Arahant is more than all those persons. The whole purpose of the Buddhist education is to develop the personality of person. When it is compared with the objectives of modern education, Buddhist education objective seems to be a wide and deep one. If the features of personality are seen with students, it can be considered great. The society with them is peaceful. Buddhism has presented the facts like liquor, gambling and misconduct that cause personality into decay and destroy. It is clear that all the necessary advice for a student to develop personality is given by Buddhism. Buddhist education is a way to end all the mental ills like lust, faults and ignorance through the entire physical and mental discipline and can be a way of gaining spiritual purity. Discipline, an important education objective, is the controlling body and speech. The knowledge that a person gains on crafts without any discipline is not for the good of society, but the Buddhist view is that it should be with ethics. The intelligence of the person, who is without virtue and discipline, is fruitless. It is clear from one of the main activities of an education process is training members to live honouring the other members of the society. The object of Buddhist education is to teach person keeping him as the centre and subordinates in various social status by keeping close relationship with them from childhood and how to live a fruitful life One important thing that Buddhism expects is to create a person with high self-confidence. According to Buddhism, the greatest self-confident person is not to worry even facing with Eight Worldly Conditions. Teaching how to face eight worldly conditions is trained with the objectives of Buddhist education. Asia Pacific Institute of Advanced Research (APIAR) DOI: 10.25275/apjcectv3i2edu8 Page101 Discourse on Loving-kindness states which presents person to live a wealthy life, education, family life condition, living environment, the position of his parents and by thinking about them to live with what is available. Confirming a lifestyle of good conduct is the objective of Buddhist education. Another objective of Buddhist education is to train person to look at oneself and others with love and respect. Without being selfish and leading to act selflessly is done with this objective. The main code of ethics of Buddhism, Pancasīla (Five Precepts), is the principle of protecting human right. The objective of Buddhist education is to create the well-being or benefit of person and society. It is very clear now that five precepts are necessary to create world peace and to end the worldwide spread environment of unrest or intolerance and for the human right protection Where Buddhist education aims and objectives are concerned, there are few important facts in the Discourse on Blessing ‘Vast learning, perfect handicraft, a high trained discipline, and pleasant speech. This is the Highest Blessing. Vast learning means gaining a vast knowledge. In a religious sense, it is learning about nine-fold Dispensation and the ability to describe them in various ways. The objective of Buddhist education is not only to give this energy, but it is necessary to put those theories into practice. Buddhist education philosophy is with the objective of creating complete lifestyles of the masses. It is very clear that the initial and final objective of Buddhist education is purifying mind. The Buddhist education system has been formed in a way that it shows life objectives and education objectives. By cultivating all the things of the character of the student who gets education, the objective of education is to create a good person to the society. So, there should be a service to the society and it is the main concept of the Buddhist education. If the society is formed with the above mentioned education objectives, there won’t be any social problem, complexity or any corruption. In this manner, for the benefit of social expertise, it is possible to understand how people get help and support from Buddhist doctrine. The researcher expects to share the vision on Buddhist Philosophy of Education for the benefit of society through this research.

123-136

Authors: Yuanchun Xia, Boonsub Panichakarn, Sahas Bunditkul

This paper aims to make a prediction of freight volume along NSEC (North South Economic Corridor) in a quantitative approach. To start, a brief introduction to NSEC is presented, in which the reason why the prediction is critical important in this field of research is explained and the basic three notions for this research are indicated. Afterwards, parameters of the freight volume is analyzed through GRA (Grey Analysis ), then the model is to be set up for forecasting based on data in the past ten years (2005 to 2015). The following sections are the testing of the model for adjustment of the data and the mode as well. Thereafter, the forecasting of freight volume is concluded after the predication of parameters. Some limitations and recommendations are also presented for further study at the ending section.

147-156

Authors: Ngu Kee Shing, Saedah Siraj, Norlidah Alias

The purpose of this paper is to obtain expert consensus on the design of the intergenerational module for the elderly and the children. This research is a quantitative method to obtain the expert opinions. A total of 21 experts in elderly education, school counselors, academic experts, experts in gerontology and advisers to senior citizens associations were selected to analyze the fuzziness of expert consensus. The questionnaire containing 6 main items was given to experts. Consensus from the experts were further analysed using Fuzzy Delphi technique. Overall, the findings of the study found that expert consensus on the types of the intergenerational module. Panel experts agreed on the design of the intergenerational module that are elders serve the youth, shared program and reciprocal mutual learning. These modules can be used as a design module that suitable in the Malaysian context because consensus of experts is more than 75% with a threshold value (d) ≤ 0.2.

172-182

Authors: Prince Charles Acquah, Elijah Boadu Frimpong, Julius Kwame Borkloe

Competency Based Training (CBT) concept of teaching and learning introduced in the technical universities in Ghana has proven to be a very important educational programme in the technical and vocational education in Ghana. It has greatly improved the employability skills of graduates from the technical universities who have gone through this training and it is also helping to address the shortage of skilled and competent workforce needed in the country. In spite of its importance and prospects, there are some challenges in the CBT implementation that require urgent attention. This paper therefore seeks to address these challenges in the CBT concept. Twenty-five (25) academic staff across eight (8) out of the ten (10) technical universities in Ghana were interviewed. The findings revealed that inadequate funding, lack of infrastructural support and lack of policy guidelines and institutional support are the major challenges in the implementation process. The paper discusses these challenges and concludes with some recommendations that would help to improve the CBT concept of teaching and learning in technical universities in particular and the technical and the vocational education in Ghana in general.

195-206

Authors: Tahar Ayadat, Omar Ouda, Alaa Salman, Danish Ahmed, Andi Asiz

The main objectives of this paper are to present advanced research development and activities at the Department of Civil Engineering at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University (PMU) and to discuss expected research outcomes and its contributions to Saudi’s society. Currently the department is supported by five teaching staffs comprises of four full time professors with PhDs and one laboratory instructor at master degree’s level. The research areas within the department are very diverse incorporating main civil engineering faculty expertise in the fields of environmental, geotechnical, construction and structural engineering with minor research activities in the area of engineering education. The research infrastructures such as advanced computer simulation and state-the-art engineering laboratories are being established in the department and graduate program which will offer initially master degree under civil engineering is being developed. Research strategies, challenges and opportunities at the department -- with the university being focused on teaching activities while building foundations for research infrastructures-- will be discussed. Discussion followed by recommendations will be given to improve research performance at the department.

218-226

Authors: Muhammad Rafiq, Abul Bashar, Arifusalam Shaikh

Higher education institutions in the private sector are under budgetary constraints when it comes to developing their IT infrastructure to provide varied services to the students, the faculty and the staff. This is in contrast to their public sector counterparts who are abundantly funded by the government. In order to optimize their spending and cut down on the capital expenditure and operation expenditure for setting up an IT infrastructure, the private universities resort to the Cloud Computing model of leasing infrastructure from cloud providers. This then enables them to run their in-house developed applications or outsource the application development and provisioning to cloud service providers. In this backdrop, the paper presents a case study of providing Knowledge Management Service (KMS) to the IT end users of the university which runs on the leased cloud infrastructure. The motivation for the choice of this service was that KMS effectively enhances the efficiency and facilitates the ongoing knowledge transfer for the progress of the university. To this end, a methodology is proposed to provide a platform to build a decision support system for private universities to help them in procuring Cloud Computing facility and to develop the KMS for the IT users. It also presents initial survey results of the potential of adaptability of Cloud Computing services by enlisting and measuring their merits and drawbacks.

235-245

Authors: João Pedro Albino

The issue of open data can be defined as the paradigm wherein data are available for all services and dissemination. However, the open data debate is just beginning. Open government data are just a point on the way on the road to improve a government's management. However, only data availability is not enough to add value. To do so, governments could make a set of tools available, developed on open platform, for a better data treatment and visualization by their users. Thus, the objective of this paper is to discuss a proposal of an "open" project (open source), which seeks to foster a debate about open data, big data and display of relevant information by users, providing a repository with coding in an open platform, to assist in the data analysis available in the Brazilian Open Data Portal, thus adding value to such open data. The project proposal uses R language and its ecosystem of statistical resources.

259-267

Authors: Ju Seok Lee, Jeong Beom Kim

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a virtual painting board in an FPGA board. The system has a CMOS camera as an input device and a VGA monitor as an output device. Users can draw lines, colour a picture or both and can follow it on the VGA screen. We have used VHDL and Verilog-HDL for the hardware design. The system hardware consists of CCD capture, RAW2RGB, SDRAM, Main Ctrl, M4K, and VGA controller. The system detects yellow and red colour with the camera and stores and converts the coordinate. Based on Altera DE2 board, we have used 1.3 M pixel CMOS camera, VGA monitor and coloured bands for this system. The design is developed by QuartusⅡ11.1 software.