The Challenges in Developing E-Content

Abstract

Malaysia is considered an active key player in information communication technologies (ICTs) especially in education. In fact, in the National Higher Education Strategic Plan, one of the Critical Agenda Projects (CAPs) of the Minister of Higher Education is e-learning. It goes without saying that all higher learning providers in Malaysia must be prepared to provide state-of-the-art facilities for the students. One critical aspect of e-learning is the quality and quantity of the content, or what will be referred by many scholars as e-content. This paper attempts to identify the challenges of content development for e-learning practice at the National Defence University of Malaysia (NDUM). It is crucial to investigate this issue since the university just purchased its Learning Management System (LMS). It is expected that resistance will be present as the academics at the defence university is a mixture of junior and senior lecturers, as well as civilian and military lecturers; and some of these academics have been teaching without the assistance of e-learning. In so doing, the methodology of this paper will mainly be content analysis of various reports, governmental documents, as well as semi-structured interviews with lecturers at the NDUM. As this paper acts as a preliminary investigation into the issue of e-content at the university, only seven lecturers were interviewed. Initial findings suggest that there are basically five challenges of developing e-content at the NDUM. These include the lack of ICT and e-learning policy that can provide guidelines to academics; the uncertainty of ownership for e-learning initiatives; the lack of understanding of the roles of e-learning; the lack of awareness on e-learning; and the difficulties to develop military based content due to confidentiality issues. Two possible solutions for these challenges are also examined which take into consideration the urgent need to set up an e-Learning Unit and to provide series of workshops and seminars of teaching with technology, or relevant courses. It is found that in the effort to give students the exposure to and experience of e-learning, the first step in the implementation phase, which is to develop e-content, has alerted the university of the various fundamental challenges that need to be addressed accordingly.