Abd Karim Alias
About the editor
I am a Professor of Food Technology at the School of Industrial Technology, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) and the Director of Centre for Development of Academic Excellence.
As a teacher, I always aspire to nurture and educate my students to become lifelong learners. I believe our role as educators goes beyond transmitting knowledge — our role is to nurture our students to become lifelong learners — to teach them the skills of ‘learn how to learn’ and to teach them the appreciation and the love for knowledge. As Socrates said, “I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think”. I believe that teaching is an exciting adventure in which both the teacher and the students participate and cooperate to achieve a common goal.
I’m a strong advocate of leveraging the Internet as an alternative medium for learning and teaching. My mission is to step out from the physical boundary and comfort of my classroom, to reach out as many global learners as possible by sharing whatever little knowledge and skills I have for the benefit of mankind. To achieve this mission, I have developed and maintained a number of teaching portals, websites, and blogs related to teaching/learning, research, and education/higher education in general.
I made my work accessible and visible to the masses. I created original learning resources as well as curated existing educational resources. As of September 19, 2017, my teaching videos on YouTube Channel alone have received 500K+ views from 190+ countries, with estimated minutes watched of 1,180,586 (2 years 89 days) and a total of 2000+ subscribers.
I started blogging way back in 2005 as a way to share resources and express my thoughts on issues pertaining to education, particularly higher education. I still maintain a blog, ‘One Stop Learning’ which focuses on teaching & learning and discussion on issues related to higher education.
I’m also visible on Slideshare with close to 85,000 views and 4,000+ download by users from 190+ countries. I’m active on Twitters and other social media such as Google+, Pinterest, Storify, etc., as well as a professional network such as LinkedIn, Academia.edu and ResearchGate.
In 2002, I received the inaugural USM Excellent Educator Award and in 2010 I received the Anugerah Tokoh (Distinguished Person) in Anugerah Sanggar Sanjung.
I also was the recipient of the prestigious Anugerah Akademik Negara award (National Academic Award) in 2008 for teaching and Malaysia’s Rising Star Award (Highest Research Citation in Agricultural Sciences/Food Science & Technology) 2015, 2016 and 2017.
In my current role as the Director of the Centre for Development of Academic Excellence, I’m responsible for designing and running a professional development programme in technology-enhanced learning and student-centred learning for the academic staff.
I’m a master trainer for the Academy for Higher Education Leadership (AKEPT)and also involved as a trainer in the technology-mediated learning workshop. I have conducted more than 100 workshops especially on using technology in teaching and learning in universities in Malaysia.
I have become a staunch advocate of open education and online learning. I have developed a number of open online courses, available free, on several open learning platforms. Two of my open online courses are Flipped Classroom and Copyright for Educators, available on OpenLearning platform.
I’m now leading a project to develop open educational resources (OER) and MOOC for the university and so far has succeeded to produce more than 30 coursewares. With my active involvement in online learning, I have been appointed as a co-Chairman of the Technical Committee for Malaysian MOOCs initiative, a project by the Ministry of Education of Malaysia.
On the research front, I have published more than 140 papers (h-index 38) in international citation-indexed journals and several book/encyclopedia chapters. I have also published/presented more than 70 conference papers (7 of them as a keynote speaker) (Google Scholar). I was the recipient of more than 30 publication awards from USM.
Currently, I’m in the editorial board of the Journal of Physical Science and Tropical Life Science Research (USM Publisher), the International Journal of Food Research(UPM Publisher), Food Hydrocolloids (Elsevier) and Journal Food Packaging & Shelf Life (Elsevier).
