Mohd Hanafi Mohd Yasin

Online ICT-Courses Integrated for the Hearing-Impaired Individuals’ Education: A Preliminary Study from the Students’ Perception

Computers and Internet have become necessities of life, mostly because they provide a gateway into the World Wide Web. The web-growth as a platform for online-learning makes the Web an essential technology; hence the accessibility issues in Web applications are vital, this includes the Hearing-Impaired Individuals. The objective of this research is to investigate the Hearing-Impaired Individuals’ level of interests in the various ICT courses, hence to identify the most-demanded chosen ICT course, to offer via E-Learning. The Methodology of this research were designed in such a way where the questionnaires for the students acts as the research instrument involved in this research. A total of 24 schools executing the Hearing-Impaired Education Program from the whole of Malaysia is the research location. This brings a total of 245 Hearing-Impaired Students from Form 4 and Form 5 of the Secondary Level as the research sample. In evaluating the results of the questionnaires, among all the ICT courses, the Computer Graphics course has the majority chosen by the Hearing-Impaired Individuals, mainly for reasons like enhances deaf-creativity in drawing images, web-design, 3D-animation and multimedia purposes.

Challenges in distributed leadership: evidence from the perspective of headteachers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the issues and challenges faced by headteachers in practicing the suggested distributed leadership (DL) approach in three primary schools to their middle layer leaders. Design/methodology/approach – The study employed a case study design and data were collected through semi-structured interviews. A total of three headteachers were interviewed in examining and exploring challenges within the DL practices. The transcripts from the semi-structured interviews formed the basis of the findings. Findings – The findings suggest that senior teachers lack confidence in making decisions and rely on the consent from headteachers even though they are empowered to make their own decisions. Another significant issue faced by headteachers when distributing their leadership is the ability, expertise, experience, and willingness of teachers to hold leadership roles and responsibilities. Originality/value – The results are important since there have been few empirical studies on the issues and challenges faced by headteachers in practising DL approach in primary schools in the context of Malaysia. This initiative sidelines the traditional school leadership approach which emphasises on the accountability of headteachers as the sole school leader.

Special Educators’ Level of Training, Knowledge and Confidence of Autism

The objective of this research was to identify the students entrepreneurial career aspirations in the public instituitions of higher education. The research also was designed to determine the factors that influence the entrepreneurial career aspirations of the students. A set of questionaires were distributed to 420 respondents from three universities namely, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Islamic International University of Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. The findings showed majority of the students were not interested to become entrepreneur eventhough more than 80 percent of them have positive attitude towards entrereneurship. Profit-orientation factor and the needs to have a successful life are the dominant factors that influenced the students towards entrepreneurial career. However, the entrepreneurial characteristics of the students was high, except for the willingness to take risks. The finding also showed that there are a positive and significant correlations between entrepreneurial characteristics, interest towards entrepreneurial career and attitude towards students entrepreneurial career aspirations. These findings concluded that races, educational fields and family members are considered as the factors that contributed to the students entrepreneurial career aspirations. Based on the findings, several ways are suggested to inspire the entrepreneurial career among the students in the public higher education. Therefore, the students, the universities, lecturers, the ministry, parents and the public are resposible in realizing and believing that the entrepreneurial career is a career option once graduated.