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UTM apology welcomed, revamp on MOOC urgently needed

The MCA Religious Harmony Bureau welcomes the open apology by Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) vice-chancellor Prof Dr Wahid Omar on the erroneous comments made by the lecturers teaching the TITAS (Tamadun Islam dan Tamadun Asia) compulsory module.

In a civil and multi-cultural society such as Malaysia, such misinformation should never have happened in the first place. We applaud the forthcoming frankness of the apology on the derogatory remarks.

Moving forward, the lecturer(s) who used unapproved Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) slides endorsed by the Higher Education Ministry for the TITAS subject should be suspended pending further investigations and stern action should be taken once investigations are concluded.

The lecturer(s) should not only be let off with a warning as such actions have hurt the Hindu and Sikh communities and Malaysians at large with our diverse ethnicities and religious beliefs.

As an academician, they know that they should only use approved materials. What is more disappointing is that the lecturer(s) cooked up his/her (their) own teaching materials which not only do not reflect the true content of the subject matter, but have introduced falsities.

Moving forward, we urge the Higher Education Ministry to do the following right corrective steps:

1) Subjects and matters related to religion should be referred to experts of the religion and those who profess the religion, and not be left over to academicians who interpret religion as how they perceive another religion to be.

2) The entire MOOC approved slides should be totally re-looked and revamped by an interfaith council to ensure such an incident does not repeat again.

Such an incident is an awakening to us all whereby important matters involving sensitivities have been left to so-called academician to interpret. We wonder if there will any errors in those MOOC approved slides in the future? We won’t know. Therefore the need for it to be relooked into and reviewed are more than ever urgent now.


CHRIS DANIEL WONG is Bangsar MCA Youth chairperson and MCA Religious Harmony Bureau secretary.

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