ENCULTURATING ETHICS THROUGH ACTIVE LEARNING: A STUDY ON TECHNICAL STUDENTS AT A PRIVATE MALAYSIAN UNIVERSITY

Malaysia, a highly middle income nation developed its Higher Education Blueprint 2015-2025 in early April, 2015 to spearhead the transformation of the higher education sector over the coming decade while facing global challenges. The Blueprint has identified six “Student Aspirations” to be achieved through higher education - ethics and spirituality, leadership skills, national identity, language proficiency, thinking skills and knowledge. An exploratory study in a private higher learning institution was conducted in April, 2017 with two main objectives;
(i) to examine the lecturer’s class experiences and approaches in the teaching of Ethics and Social Responsibility course (MPU3) to undergraduate technical students
(ii) to assess the effectiveness of active learning methods in driving technical students’ interests in ethics discipline.

A qualitative approach is used to analyse collected data from students’ perceptions. A form with three open-ended questions is designed to gather students’ feedback through self-reflections at the end of the course i.e.
(i) the knowledge acquired;
(ii) comments on the methodology applied by the lecturer
(iii) suggestions for improvement, if any.

This study has found that technical students must be equipped with ethics and social responsibility knowledge to build ethical consciousness since technical subjects do not emphasize on ethics. Active learning methods are effective in driving students’ ethical conscience. As a contribution, this study may be used as source of reference for educators to impart knowledge on ethics and morality for social sustainability and wellbeing of a society.