Preserving Culture and Heritage through New Generation Methods: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) As the Early Platform

Abstract

The young generation nowadays are lack of knowledge in national culture and heritage. Things that are related to the national culture and heritage are often considered as outdated and irrelevant to today’s youth generation who are exposed to advances of science and technology. Even if they have knowledge in them, they are limited to the performing arts or conventional fine arts like weaving. Therefore, this study attempted to expose deeper knowledge of national culture and heritage to students in line with the modern learning methods. Towards that process, online learning methods were applied so that the aspects of national culture and heritage can be disseminated efficiently to students in interesting and systematic manner. In this study, the online application that was used is Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) for the subject of HNS 3023 National Culture and Heritage. The subject was offered in Semester 1 2016/2017 within the Malaysian Studies programme at Sultan Idris Education University. The MOOC exposed to students about online learning methods that have currently been conducted in the university. It is hoped that it can be a catalyst for a wider discussion on national culture and heritage with a state-of-the-art learning tools.