Browsing by Author "Arifin, Muhammad Ahkam"

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Adopting Learning Management System in Indonesian Higher Education: The Encountering Challenges to the Transformation
(2019) Rahman, Ahmad Ardillah; Arifin, Muhammad Ahkam; Al-furqan
"As a third world country, Indonesia undergoes a huge digital divide compared to other developed nations. With this condition, educators and university staff should transform the practices of education by adapting to technological platforms of Learning Management Systems (LMS) as one of the ways to accelerate the increasing quality of Indonesian education. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to evaluate the implementation of LMS in Indonesian higher educations. There are three aspects elaborated from the practices: technical issue, organisational issue, and demographic issue. It is found that the major problem with the technical issue is the lack of teachers’ expertise on computers literacy. Furthermore, the lack of systematic procedure in implementing the system, the absence of faculty members’ commitment towards the transformation, and the less involvement of university leaders in promoting the system are concluded as challenges from the organisational issue. From the demographic issue, it is apparent that the government should provide equal educational access across Indonesia for the new transformation to be effective. Given the various challenges, some further recommendations are offered to tackle the problems."
Bilingualism: The Beneficial and Contradictory Findings
(2018) Arifin, Muhammad Ahkam
"Historically bilinguals were often associated with low intelligence, high mental confusion, and limited number of vocabularies. In their seminal work Peal and Lambert (1962), however, reported that bilingual children significantly outperformed monolinguals on verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests. This paper first reviews the benefits that bilinguals have when acquiring an additional language. Secondly, the cognitive benefits will be explored, particularly the bilingual advantage in executive functioning (EF), empirically linked with general intelligence and the ability to better cope with brain damage (e.g., dementia) mostly known as 'cognitive reserve'. This paper culminates with presenting speculations why some studies report contradictory findings."
Developmental History of Character Education and How it could be Defined
(2017) Arifin, Muhammad Ahkam
"The central theme of this paper discusses the developmental history of character education (CE) and some definitions that have been referred to it. It first explores the historical development of character education that is mostly sourced in American history. Within this section, it is shown that character education seemed to decline between 1940s and 1960s, yet such other approaches to character education started emerging as `values clarification` and 'moral dilemma discussion', although they both appeared to have different underlying theories. It then moves to some definitions of character education that have been put forward by different experts in the field; within the same title, the author of current paper also provides his own definition based on the mentioned facts."
The Implementation of Ccollaborative Learning in Teaching Writing to Indonesian University Students: A Blended Language Learning Context
(2019) Arifin, Muhammad Ahkam; Rahman, Ahmad Ardillah
"Upon the policy of the integration of technology into language learning by the Indonesian government (macro level) and the university where the authors are currently teaching (meso level) (Arifin, 2017), we will use Wiki, a feature of SharePoint within Office 365, as the tool to promote collaborative learning in teaching writing to university students. To demonstrate the robustness of theoretical and pedagogical foundation of the designs, the design philosophy and principles of collaborative learning as an approach to teaching writing are first explored. The paper then continues to the discussion on how these principles are put into the context and can be facilitated with the use of Wiki. It concludes with a brief discussion of some potential limitations in the implementation of these design patterns."
The Teaching Methodology and Assessment of Character Education in Indonesian English Curriculum: Teacher`s Perceptions
(2017) Arifin, Muhammad Ahkam
"To develop students' knowledge subjects (e.g., English) and character (e.g., honesty), the Ministry of Education of Indonesia in 2013 launched a new curriculum called Kurikulum 2013. All subjects in this curriculum were claimed to be fully integrated with character education (CE). Notwithstanding a growing body of research stressing the need for CE to be integrated into school curricula, empirical studies on teachers` perceptions regarding the implementation of CE “have made few inroads in high schools” (Leming, 2006, p. 84). Thus, the current research aimed to explore English teachers` perceptions in Indonesia regarding the teaching methodology and assessment of CE integrated into the English high school curriculum. It utilised semi-structured interviews with four English teachers as the respondents. Regarding the teaching methodology, the findings revealed that teachers (1) had little consensus on how moral values could be integrated into English teaching materials and methods, (2) employed different strategies in teaching values, and (3) faced challenges in implementing CE (e.g., lack of training). In terms of assessment, it was found that teachers 13 (1) mostly employed observation as the assessment tool, (2) claimed the invalidity of quantitative assessment, and (3) expressed concern over the validity of the assessment of students' behaviour."