Positioning of the Research Problem in Creative Arts Thesis

The present paper seeks to examine the rhetorical structure of the literature review (LR) sections of English research articles (RAs) written by Egyptian researchers in the field of linguistics. For this purpose, a sample of ten LRs was selected from RAs published in local and international English-medium journals in linguistics between 2013 and 2019. The study deployed hybrid techniques and approaches for data collection (random/non-random sampling) and data analysis (genre-based/corpus-driven and qualitative/quantitative). Findings showed rhetorical variation in the LRs written by both groups, especially concerning Move 2 and Move 3 that were used more frequently in the international sample than in the local one, where the focus was on Move 1. In addition, some new steps emerged. The findings also shed light on the problems within the rhetorical structure of the LRs published locally, implying that the lack of rhetorical knowledge is one of the major reasons that hinder writing pr...

A key support service in doctoral research that has increasingly gained attention is academic writing courses. This position paper argues for the institutionalization of graduate writing courses in universities in Ghana in order to acquaint doctoral students with the theoretical, procedural, and practical aspects of the writing of high stakes academic genres. An overview (including evaluation) of existing courses on research-related writing in some universities is proffered. The study consequently presents arguments to support a proposal for institutional graduate writing courses in Ghanaian universities, followed by a discussion of other pertinent issues such as the curriculum, staffing, and funding. It is hoped that the institutionalization of such a writing support service will ultimately improve the quality of doctoral research education in Ghana.

COVID-19, a highly contagious disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus-2, has infected over 3 million people worldwide to date. The only way to stop the virus from spreading is avoiding close contact. Hence, the conventional teaching and learning environment was transformed from face-to-face to online education through Zoom, personal to interactive, and seminars to webinars. However, the impacts and feedbacks from the students are unknown. Therefore, this survey study was conducted to evaluate the responses from students. The selected study unit is CVE40004 Water Engineering, an outcome unit with complex engineering problem offered in Swinburne University of Technology Malaysia Sarawak Campus. The teaching pedagogical approaches that had been adopted are crossover learning, context-based learning, computational thinking, and adaptive teaching. Most of the students proclaimed that learning quality, effectiveness, interest and comfortability were reduced significantly after attending online classes. With adequate computer skills and facilities, most of the students still felt isolated and faced difficulties in communicating with group members. It is believed that the situation and responses will get better after the students adapt to new online teaching and learning environment.

Innovations can be translated into social entrepreneurship to benefit disadvantage communities. This paper narrates the social entrepreneurship project between Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) and Universiti Teknologi MARA Cawangan Selangor (UCS). UNIMAS’s crab cage innovation was implemented at the Pulau Salak community in Santubong, Sarawak. The social entrepreneurship expertise was provided by UCS. The translational research cum collaborative project has improved the living standards by exploiting on the built environment which is perfect for crab farming. Aquaculture as a cash crop will ensure food security and significant economic growth. Translational research projects should be the new normal after the pandemic lockdowns.   Keywords: Translational research; Social entrepreneurship; Socio-economy; Aquaculture.    eISSN: 2398-4287 © 2020. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BYN...

This study presents a systematic review of the existing literature on the benefits and challenges faced regarding the use of augmented reality (AR) in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. Guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method, a systematic review of the ScienceDirect database identified 19 related studies. Further investigation of these articles resulted in four themes of AR advantages, namely its contribution to learners, the learning outcomes, the interaction of AR, and other benefits. These four themes further produced a total of 16 sub-themes, while the challenges aspect of AR resulted in 5 sub-themes. The most reported benefit of AR is that it stimulates learning achievement. Some observed that the challenges imposed by AR are concerned with marker detection and usability. Several other problems and advantages of AR usage in STEM education were also discovered, which will be discussed in detail. Additionally, the existing gaps of AR study in the STEM education field were identified, and recommendations are therefore presented for future research.

This report emphasises the importance of open educational resources (OER) for improving equality in education. OER are a worthwhile option to make education more accessible, affordable, shareable and reusable. The adoption, expansion and enculturation of OER with the aid of information and communication technology in Malaysian education will transform educational practices through the effective use of educational resources available with open licences.

In 2005, National Heritage Act was enacted by the Government of Malaysia as an effort to protect and preserve tangible and intangible cultural heritage in the country. Despite its significance and well intentions, the Act remains weak and limited in terms of its definition, scope, implementation and awareness. This, in particular, becomes problematic when it comes to intangible cultural heritage (ICH) as it is living and continuously evolving. The increasingly rapid globalisation at the end of the 20th century causes more communities to become susceptible to frequent changes. In addition, Malaysian studies itself is still in the early phase of forming and building the breadth and depth of local knowledge of the country and its society. One particular aspect of concern is knowledge about minority ethnic groups with the potentials to be considered as regional heritage such as the various Peranakan communities in Malaysia. Hence, it is a race against time to have the communities' rich and invaluable culture documented for future preservation and conservation. Against this background, the present article explores theses as a potential viable source of knowledge on a minority ethnic community in Malaysia with a focus on Peranakan Chinese in Kelantan. Selected available theses pertaining to social aspects of the community that were written at bachelor degree levels at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and Universiti Malaya (UM) from 1970s to 2010s are analysed using content analysis technique. Findings of the study suggests that theses can potentially serve as custodians to the untapped "treasure trove" of Malaysian heritage by preserving arcane information of the community at the grass-root level. Several theses written even go beyond "potentials" after they were polished and published as books, subsequently providing a significant contribution to building and defining what we now know about the community and its heritage.

Automotive design is a specialized discipline in which designers are challenged to create emotionally appealing designs. From a practice perspective, this requires that designers apply their hermeneutic as well as reflective design thinking skills. However, due to the increasing demand for new car models, it is not always possible to keep generating new car designs without some form of assistive means. Therefore, it is common practice to use Automated Morphing Systems (AMS) to facilitate and accelerate the design process in the automotive industry. However, AMS, which is an efficient algorithmic driven tool for form generation, lacks the emotional knowledge of human beings, as well as the ability to introduce a “creative” and preferably a “winning” design. The purpose of this research is to study designers' reasoning about product (automotive) form, their form generation activity, and the implications of these. The research objective is to understand how designers generate forms driven by their implicit values, beliefs and attitudes towards designing, and how these are supported by their visualization and representation skills. Four research questions have been formulated in order to get a firm answer posed in this research. Generation of measurable and testable data – which involved both qualitative and quantitative research to gather and analyze implicit and explicit designer’s knowledge – constituted the main empirical effort for this thesis. A design research methodology framework consisting of three different parts was used in this data gathering exercise. These parts are: descriptive study I, prescriptive study, and descriptive study II. They involved methods such as surveys, observation studies and evaluation studies. Master’s students’ evaluations as well as the designers’ own interpretations of their sketches – which represent the sequence of morphed forms – were considered essential aspects of the empirical studies. The findings of this study can be summarized as follows: 1. Approaches in form development among designers vary due to their experiences, which affect their sketching abilities, activities, and implicit thinking patterns. In their sketching and form development activities, designers emphasize the most informative views, such as façade and three quarter front views, compared to other views of the car. Rather than adopt a uniform transformation strategy which includes the entire car, they also select what elements to morph. 2. In manual form generation, designers contribute with their personal and creative input in the development of the forms of the overall car, its selected items, and regions that determine the overall character of the car. Major differences in the morphing approaches applied by designers and automated CAD systems reside in the recognition and interpretation of the meaning of form elements. 3. Considering the inability of AMS to morph selectively and inconsistently, as well as to introduce ambiguity and variance, it is suggested here that AMS may be useful only for convergent transformation, which typically occurs during the later stages of the styling process. 4. Although perceptions vary according to how representations are presented in the morphing process, the Perceptual Product Experience (PPE) framework can still be considered a useful tool for establishing familiarity, for understanding quality characteristics and the nature of the product, and, finally, for determining meanings and assessing the values of form elements. In conclusion, the work presents a descriptive model for practice-based design thinking about form development in automotive design. Manual interpolative morphing has been the focal area of study. The study categorizes meaning with respect to designer perception. Based on the study of manual morphing exercises, a new methodology of analyzing form syntactics, pragmatics and semantics related to design thinking, form development, and automotive design has been developed.

Authorial stance, or stance-taking, in written texts expresses the interpersonal meaning of language, where authors position themselves with regard to the message being written about as well as to the readers. It has also been defined as how the author projects his or her own voice and engages with other voices brought into the text.Authorial stance has been identified as an important skill in effective writing, not only in clearly argumentative texts often associated with the arts and social sciences, but is equally important in scientific writing making for “objective” claims. Two issues provide the basis for this study. First, while authorial stance has been studied widely in a variety of texts, including scientific research texts, little is known about how authorial stance is manifested in medical genres as medical research articles and medical case reports, which are the two most published written genres in the discipline. Second, within the area of medical research writing, th...

Blended learning is fast becoming a method of teaching and learning in higher institutions especially with the significant paradigm shift to collaborative technologies. Although there may not be any stated policy framework on the adoption of blended learning in higher institutions, it is being used by educators and students to enhance teaching and learning experiences. Library as a formidable part of any institution has a role to play in supporting teaching and learning innovation. Blended learning is characterized by blending the traditional teaching method with

The subject of space and its profundity always find its way into issues relating to arts and other sciences (e.g. design, social sciences, and humanities). Such equivalences of space in related areas have been unavoidable. Space is defined as a free, unoccupied area of infinite emptiness, but also described as the scope of within which things exist. Space, which is empty is actually nothing, and cannot be represented or conveyed but only suggested. In the art of music, space is suggested by the interval of time, a duration that can be measured or an immeasurable breadth based upon a feeling of expanse. This paper discusses the spatial aspects of two piano works from Toru Takemitsu, a Japanese composer and Marzelan Salleh, a Malaysian composer, as they both explore their spaces and spacings in music composition.

Research article introduction is crucial in determining the chances for publication. Non–native English writers have been reported to face difficulties in structuring rhetorical strategies in the introduction section. Although rhetorical models in writing are available, research articles of different disciplines vary in rhetorical structure and style. Therefore, there is a need to explore the rhetorical strategies in the Introduction sections for non-native writers in Computer Science discipline. This qualitative study explored the moves and steps in 150 Scopus indexed Computer Science research articles written by Malaysian academicians. It also examined the extent to which the writers conformed to Create a Research Space (CARS) model when writing the introduction sections. Move analysis using CARS model was employed to identify the rhetorical structures of the corpus while face-to-face semi- structured interviews were conducted to understand the use of rhetorical strategies through...

Daylight efficiency correlates to window design. Guidelines recommend a 20 per cent window-to-floor ratio (WFR) at 900mm windowsill height, where acceptable 300 lx to 500 lx measured at 900mm working plane height.  However, Islamic religious schools use a 300mm height table known as ‘rehal’. Studies neglect the difference in required working plane height that effect window design and the illuminance level. A study was established to propose Syaheeza’s Daylight Rule of Thumb (DRT) for Islamic religious schools. This paper aims to highlight the reliability of the methodology framework used in Syaheeza’s DRT, such as surveys, Arabic handwriting performance assessment and computer simulations. Keywords: Daylighting; Islamic religious school; methodology framework eISSN: 2398-4287© 2021. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)....

This article discusses the internationalization capacity building project at the Karaganda Technical University (‘KTU’) in Kazakhstan. The project, entitled “Capacity building for the internationalization of a technical university by means of digital learning technologies,” was supported by the fund “Scientific foundations “Mangilik el” (education of the 21st century, fundamental and applied research in the humanities)” for scientists 2020–2022. The project’s primary purpose was to explicate a sustainable strategy for internationalizing a Kazakh technical university, considering the national and international contexts, evaluating internationalization capacity needs, formulating and implementing a capacity-building response for internationalization, and enhancing the qualifications and abilities of students and teachers to an internationally comparable level. In addition, the project delivers a set of strategies for internationalization and a benchmarking methodology for evaluating t...

MQA

Problem statement: Considering the importance and necessity of developing Handicrafts as a cultural-economic component, studying all aspects affecting it and determining a solution in this regard is necessary. Higher education in this field is attracting students at the undergraduate level since 1983 and has followed a fixed curriculum with the same approach. Because competencies and the need to consider them as a developer of curriculum is essential, it must be reviewed and evaluated in every field continuously and according to the current situation. Accordingly, the present study seeks to answer the question of what are the professional competencies of Iranian undergraduate Handicrafts that have received less attention in its curriculum. This study can be considered as an introduction and a solution to the need to pay attention and review the curriculum in this field. Research objective: The main purpose of this study is to identify the Neglected aspects of professional competencies in the Iranian Handicrafts undergraduate curriculum. Research method: The present research is of qualitative type and is done by documentary method and qualitative content analysis. The use of a comparative approach in this study is done with the objective of examining the professional competencies of Handicrafts in higher education in Iran, Turkey, Malaysia, India and England in the three dimensions of knowledge, skills and attitudes. Conclusion: The results show that in order to promote the field of Handicrafts in Iran, in addition to the emphasis of the curriculum on technical skills and cultural and historical knowledgewhich are themselves very important-other essential competencies are needed to be seriously considered with entrepreneurial, economic, and social approaches.

This paper investigates the STEAM-themed theses in Turkey in terms of using the design thinking (DT) approach based on the document analysis method. According to the result, 16 STEAM-themed theses were discovered; however, only three of them used design-based problem-solving processes. The findings indicate that STEAM education has not been studied sufficiently in the national literature. The reasons can be related to the lack of sufficient sources, training, and STEAM experienced teachers. In the international literature, the DT approach is recommended both as a problem-solving process and a framework for STEAM education because of integrating multiple disciplines into STEAM education and increasing students’ motivation in the problem-solving process. The STEAM and DT approach also have shared characteristics. Therefore, this paper concludes that the DT approach can ease the transition from traditional education to STEAM education in Turkey. It can provide teachers’ creating and implementing STEAM activities and enable students’ developing positive attitudes towards STEAM.

In this paper, we review systematically the role of problem-based learning (PBL) in developing soft skills in Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) and other fields of studies. The Systematic Literature Review (SLR) includes the most recent empirical, review, and conceptual studies from TVET and other multiple fields of studies including medicine, humanities, and engineering between the years of 2001 and 2016 collected from four databases. A qualitative method was used to accomplish the systematic review. After the collection of articles, the selected studies were analyzed through thematic analysis. From this review, we concluded that PBL as an instructional approach has a significant role in the development of soft skills among students of various disciplines including TVET; empirical evidence is predominantly conclusive in identifying the acquisitions of various soft skills including communication skills, conflict resolution skills, leadership skills, and interper...

Adequate guidance, constructive feedback and professional support during teaching practice can signifi cantly change a mediocre student teacher to one who teaches more outstandingly. This study investigates the nature of supervisor support during refl ective inquiry sessions, and how the support contributes to student teachers’ professional growth as teachers-to-be. In-depth interviews with fi ve student teachers provided data for the study. The fi ndings revealed that the focus of refl ections in the discussions between the student teachers and their supervisors revolved around the direction and implementation of the lesson; professional qualities; expressions of personal feelings, opinions and concerns; achievability of the pre-determined learning outcomes, student teachers’ manifested behaviors; and other professional supports. Refl ecting on the research participants’ levels of refl ectivity, 45 % interview entries were coded at level one -Technical Rationality (TR), 50 % at level two – Practical Action (PA), and 5 % at level three – Critical Refl ection (CR). The fi ndings also showed that the development of student teachers’ self- effi cacy beliefs in teaching was due to three contributing factors: the employment of refl ective techniques by the supervisors, the value of accepting the strengths and weaknesses in teaching experienced by the trainees, and the applications of the outcomes gained during the refl ective inquiry sessions on the upcoming lessons. These fi ndings imply that supervisors must take refl ective inquiry conferences more seriously and recognize that productive sessions with their trainees are critical in developing future teachers with sound pedagogical know-how.

The genealogies of doctoral education in architecture can be traced to earlier distinct academic disciplines, but in the last decade design-based dissertations have changed the discourse and valuation of qualities. This newer strand, extending from integrative /collaborative studio-based learning, aligns more closely with professional doctorates in other fields. From the sole researcher model of Harvard’s doctor of Architecture, to the group-thesis model of the Berlage Institute Rotterdam, to the current reflective practitioner model of RMIT, doctoral architecture education has been customized for crossing between academic design education and into other industries or audiences. The epistemological challenge is to produce exemplary design intelligence and a substantial body of professional knowledge, customized for individual skills and outcomes, in an increasingly decentralized and mobile profession (an Engaged PhD in Architectural Intelligences). As such, the under- examined assumption of customization in architectural design-based doctoral education is here redesigned under the promise of the Mass Customization movement of industrial production, articulated as a promise for mobility and innovation within the educational-industrial complex. From the generated insights into agility and uniqueness as the doctoral values, a new model of decentralized mastery is offered. It will then be argued that this new flexible model aligns theoretically with the Deleuzian notion of Nomad Science, and the alternative forms of knowing implicated in these itinerate models. From Mass Customization and Nomad Science, this paper concludes with a proposal to imagine a radical type of customized and distributed emergent knowledge network, as already exists in some industries, and as seen in the multi-sited doctorates now appearing in some disciplines.