A study on the effectiveness of teaching philosophy of knowledge course in east coast universities of Peninsular Malaysia

This study aims to achieve two objectives namely; first, to investigate the effectiveness of teaching Philosophy of Knowledge course in public universities in East Coast region of Peninsular Malaysia. Second, to explore the perceptions on the Philosophy of Knowledgecourse through the teaching delivered to the students in universitiesEast Coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Three public universities (IPTA) were selected for this study; UNISZA, UM NilamPuri and UMK. The methodology used in this study were library research as well as the field studies in the form of analysing facts, interviews and descriptive. Interview questions and questionnaires were used in order to get the answers as well as the perceptions of the academic staffs and students on some aspects related to the effectiveness of teaching the Philosophy of Knowledge course in higher learning institutions. These aspects were focusing on the contents of the course whether the course promote moral values among students, moulding personal traits, suitable to be taught to Muslim and non-Muslim, not offensive to any party or religion other than Islam, as well as the level of students' understanding through the teaching approaches applied by lecturers. This course is believed to be able to give positive impacts on students as it encourages the students to use higher order of thinking skills and therefore it should be remained as a compulsory subject in universities.

Hence, in order to answer the research questions in this study, a number of 300 questionnaires were administered to Universiti Malaysia Kelantan (UMK) students who attended the Philosophy of Knowledge course representing a total of 1193 students who registered for the course. Out of 300 forms distributed, 257 completed forms were returned to the researcher. The forms were gathered and the data obtained from the questionnaires were analysed using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) version 19.0. Several analyses were conducted to evaluate the students’ perceptions on the effectiveness of the Philosophy of Knowledge course in universities.

The findings provide clear evidence that UMK is the only IPTA in East Coast region which offers the Philosophy of Knowledge course as a compulsory course for undergraduates. Most of the respondents in this study agreed that the course should be made compulsory to all undergraduates not only in UMK but also in all universities in East Coast region. This course also contributed to the ethnics solidarity in Malaysia as the contents are not offensive to any other religions in Malaysia. They also claimed that the teaching approaches applied by lecturers to deliver the course were very effective. Besides, this course succeeded in empowering the students with high intellectual values as well as encouraged them to be more creative and innovative.