Rahmah Lob Yussof

Scaffolding in early reading activities for down syndrome

The learning difficulties of Down Syndrome students are often related to limitation of their short term memory. They have constraints in separating the information received by the brain. This leads to difficulties in reading process. Therefore, they fail to focus when learning. Scaffolding is a systematic assistance used to ease the burden of the short term memory of the Down Syndrome students. The Scaffolding models are integrated in the development of the early reading multimedia courseware called MEL-SindD in order to give confidence and motivation to them in their early reading stage.

Persona Design Analysis of Digital Storybook for Remedial Students

Remedial students have problems in learning such as attention span in study engagement and concentration. Thus, engaging them in digital storybook is one of the ways to help them to engage and be motivated in reading environment. Unfortunately, the development of software application such as digital storybook that meets the learners’ need is a challenging task. Meanwhile the success or failure of the development is essentially determined during the initial phases preceding the actual software development itself. During these phases, getting the accurate information of users is the key factor to build strategic objectives in order to come out with the suitable application to fulfill the users’ need. Hence, we propose the persona technique which is widely used by human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers to describe users. The technique is to gather data about the users’ need, behavior, and preferences in order to construct a vivid description of the developmental objectives. Based on the participatory questionnaire checklist, observations, and interviews made, we found out that remedial students have some problems during learning sessions. This paper reports on persona design analysis which claims greater accuracy and usefulness to create digital storybook in motivating remedial students in learning. From the results, analysis of the persona is seen able to give positive influence to the design decision of a digital storybook with the right syllable patterns and interface design.

Gamification and Augmented Reality Utilization for Islamic Content Learning: The Design and Development of Tajweed Learning

Gamification and augmented reality are among the technologies that promise a lot of advantages to the learners. Previous studies have shown that both can motivate learners and make a learning process enjoyable. Nevertheless, Islamic content learning such as tajweed is claimed to be a very dry and plain content. The statement is affirmed by the outcome of our preliminary investigation that reveals tajweed learning is not attractive and it needs to be revolutionized as to make it more attractive and interesting to the present digitally native generation. Producing a high-quality tajweed learning tool is possible through good design and development process. Therefore, this study utilized a gamification and augmented reality in the design and development of tajweed learning in order to make the learning more captivating and meaningful. The ADDIE model was employed to conduct the design and development processes. Hopefully, the combination of the two technologies can attract the learners, particularly the children, and engage them in the tajweed learning process.

Assessing User Needs Analysis for Inter-school Social Information Sharing Portal

Information sharing for schools involved the activities of sharing relevant contents, exchanging knowledge and interests, and document retrieval purposes. Our preliminary study shows, updating information for schools in Malaysia using web-based portal managed by Ministry of Education that acts as a platform in disseminating updates from ministry to all schools is still fairly under-researched. To date, no social information sharing platform serves between schools in Malaysia enabling them to update and share relevant contents and documents. The main objective of this paper is to discuss the user needs analysis that has been done to pursue the development of the model for the information sharing purposes. This paper includes fact-finding activities conducted by theoretical study that involves the review of reading previous researches and related documents. Empirical study involves the distributing of questionnaires and interview sessions with the teachers who are responsible in managing students’ activities from 140 secondary schools in Pahang. The aim of the fact-finding phase is to assess their willingness to share social information and identify types of social information to be shared among schools. This paper will produce the findings on variable that can be used to help in constructing an information sharing environment among schools.

Inter-school Information Sharing Activities Through Cloud Services: User Willingness and Less Favoured Areas

Cloud services means services provided by cloud computing provider based on user requirements. Popular cloud services activities nowadays are online data storage, data backup solutions, document collaboration services and database processing. This research has two main objectives. First objective of this research are to determine the willingness of inter-school information sharing on cloud. Second research objective is to determine less favoured category of information shared on cloud. This research paper was produce by using two research methods. First technique utilized the quantitative research method that used questionnaire to gather data and information on user willingness. Second technique was using the literature method that collect the information sharing activities among schools through an analysis of related research paper to determine the less favored information sharing category to be shared on cloud. Next, the information collected on these two techniques was analysed based on the research objectives. Results of this research are respondents highly agree and willing to share school information inter-organization and intra-organization. Other results of this research are social information is one of the less favoured category of information to be shared among schools on cloud. They prefer to share on education areas mainly and also some schools prefer to share on administrative area.