JOHOR BAHRU, 4 July 2022 – The online global classroom is a collaborative one-day program to unlock creative English teaching with two Indonesian universities, Universitas Teknologi Yogyakarta (UTY) and Universitas Muhammadiyah Purwokerto (UMP), Indonesia. It is an international collaboration project organised by TESL students of the Teacher Development course from the School of Education, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (FSSH), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) through the online meeting platform of Cisco Webex Meetings. This international program was facilitated by two lecturers, Assoc. Prof. Dr Mohd Khata bin Jabor and Mr Shahrin bin Hashim.
The idea of this international collaborative program began with the suggestions from the lecturers of the Teacher Development subject, Assoc. Prof. Dr Mohd Khata bin Jabor and Mr Shahrin bin Hashim in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic while all of the TESL students’ classes were still conducted online for this semester. Thus, the idea of the online global classroom to unlock the UTM TESL students’ creative English teaching, together with the TESL students from two Indonesian universities; Universitas Teknologi Yogyakarta (UTY) and the Universitas Muhammadiyah Purwokerto (UMP), Indonesia was proposed. Both of the Indonesian universities’ students were actively participating in this beneficial international program, as a sharing session to acknowledge more online creative teaching tools which are also known as gamification used in English classes.
In this collaborative program, there were four speakers who are professors in each respective university who were invited to this program to share more insightful knowledge on the online classroom and creative teaching ideas to all future educators on online learning. They are PM Dr Mahani Mokhtar and Dr Kew Si Na who are representatives from UTM’s Language Academy as the main host of this program. Dr Condro Nur Alim, a representative from Universitas Muhammadiyah Purwokerto (UMP) and Dr Juhansar, a representative from the Universitas Teknologi Yogyakarta (UTY). Besides, there were also more up-to-date gamification tools that were introduced by each of the university’s TESL students during the sharing session on the day of the program. All of the Indonesian and UTM TESL students participated and supported each other in each of the activities introduced by each university representative. The gamification tools activities introduced by Universitas Muhammadiyah Purwokerto TESL students is Pixton and the activity introduced by Universitas Teknologi Yogyakarta TESL students is Deck.toys which are the interactive gamification tools used by the TESL students from each university.
This program brings more impactful insights for all of the TESL students as an awareness that the world of education is limitless and this opened the minds of the TESL students to discover more creative teaching in the English language as Malaysian future educators.
