In general, the main purpose of education in Malaysia is to produce a holistic individual who can contribute to national prosperity and national unity; hence significant emphasis is given to developing the physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual aspects of an individual. In this regard, Malaysian Higher Education Institutions are held responsible for producing fully rounded individuals.
Furthermore, in Malaysia, as in other countries, higher education institutions are expected to produce self-directed learners. In achieving this goal, the Malaysian universities are driven to enhance the quality of teaching by adopting a Western model of higher education to ensure success.
Although the concept of self-directed learning (SDL) has captured the hearts and minds of many Malaysian higher education educators, in particular, they face the challenge of how to design instructionally appropriate educational programs which promote learner self-direction, while maintaining a level of educator control. To create effective instructional processes, learning activities and facilitating strategies should be devised according to the learners’ level of self-direction.
I believe that the instructional design should be intellectually challenging, but within the learner’s zone of proximal development; and the educator is responsible for matching the instructional design with the learner’s stage of self-direction while preparing the learner to advance to higher levels of self-direction.
The educator is responsible for leading learners from their preferred and comfortable learning styles toward greater self-direction styles. He further added that this situation is achievable when educators gradually initiate a challenging and supportive learning context without creating discouragement. Extending his idea of the educator as a facilitator of learning, I suggest three pedagogical strategies to promote SDL:
(a) having diverse teaching and learning resources
(b) maximizing peer learning
(c) fostering constructive interaction.
In conclusion, it is obvious that SDL requires a transformation from the authoritative role of the educator into the educator as a facilitator of learning because, to promote an active learning approach, educators should acknowledge learners as equal learning partners who have the power to make decisions about their learning. The shift from teaching to facilitating means that learners, rather than educators, are the central figures in the learning and teaching process. Furthermore, this shift requires educators to abandon their more traditional authoritative roles by empowering learners to take responsibility for and control of their learning.
The educator’s role in supporting the learner’s direction of learning has provided new insights into our understanding of SDL. It is interesting to note that, not all Malaysian educators have accepted their role as facilitators of learning, but they instead remain firmly attached to their traditional roles of knowledge experts, to an extent they are comfortable with one-way knowledge transmission.
While recognizing the learner’s role in the SDL context, I would like to highlight the need to harmoniously blend the conventional mode of teaching with contemporary SDL approaches to ensure successful and meaningful learning experiences for the learners.
Most importantly, it is suggested that in fostering SDL: (i) educators should establish a positive and collaborative relationship with the learner; (ii) educators should recognize the available learning resources and restrictions existing within the actual learning context as this would allow for an effective implementation of the SDL; and (iii) the universities should play their part in assisting educators to plan their teaching strategies which facilitate the learners’ learning direction by conducting ongoing, in-service, training programs and encouraging self-development.