Responding to forums

Open University Malaysia (OUM) relies a lot on the forum for tutor-student online interaction. Perhaps it is an indicator for the tutors performance in teaching. I was only aware of it’s importance last semester when my communication subject e-tutor emphasized a lot on making the forum lively. In this semester, my tutor for the Hubungan Etnik subject also made it clear to bring some sort of interaction to the forum. He even suggested that he was fine with just a ‘TQ’ response to all his posts.

I love the forum. If utilized properly, it is a great platform to disseminate information and share ideas. In fact, OUM also have other resources available in the study portal such as the virtual lectures and e-weekly lessons. I am looking forward to explore the virtual library better this semester too. Wish me luck.

MAPSA conference : Psychology of pandemics

I attended an online conference today via ZOOM. Kind of like my first #PsychologyCheckIn throughout this academic journey. I had a glimpse of how to present your research in a conference which was great. It gave me ideas on what kind of topics I could consider trying for my final year project. I am leaning strongly towards either social or educational psychology but of course, I haven’t actually learned everything yet.

I could at least start listing them down and finding a potential supervisor for my project.

The conference was hosted by UPSI. It started at 10am and ended at 4pm. The fee was Rm50 for participants. I enjoyed the lectures and the presentations of studies done by other students. It was interesting to see this aspect of science apart from the medicine that I have been ploughing through all this while. We even had a lunch break. My lunch was kindly prepared by my husband of course – grilled chicken with rice. Yummy.

All participants get an e-certificate at the end of the conference. I have yet to receive mine. I’m not quite sure if it could be included in my annual work performance evaluation though. Even if it couldn’t be included, I am still glad that I joined the conference for its knowledge.

I am looking forward to more #PsychologyCheckIn activities. Perhaps, a Covid19 friendly internship somewhere or an event that I could organize. InsyaAllah.

Semester 5 subjects

I am glad that in one year, we have 3 semesters. It helps to keep me in focus. For Semester 5, I am taking on 3 subjects since I feel that I have a lot of things going on in the upcoming months. My subjects for this semester include;

a) Statistics for psychology – I have printed out my notes. The module has 10 topics and looking at the assignment question, I have to say that I am very clueless on how to answer it. It is a very odd situation as usually I am always able to have an idea on how to go about the topic, but this subject is just very alien to me right now. Thankfully, the e tutorial classes are scheduled on a Saturday morning. At least, I don’t have to stay up on a weekday night.

b) Hubungan Etnik – I feel this is an interesting subject to sit through. It is intriguing to see how we navigate around this subject in a non-judgemental manner as learners. I suppose this is like studying history and how it’ll fit the current culture of our society. It seems that the subject will be using Bahasa Melayu.

c) Health and Wellness – Skimming through the topics, it looks like something that is applicable in my evergreen journey of losing weight! Maybe I could learn a thing or two from it.

So far, all of the assignments pertaining to these subjects does not involve any video making. I kind of missed that! Hahaha.. but I suppose it is a safe, traditional approach to completing an assignment and scoring relevant points. I have just visited the forum a few days ago and noticed a few familiar names as learners introduce themselves in the forum. Looking forward to a new adventure in learning!