WEEK 7 : ROLE OF INSTITUTION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Hi Assalamualaikum everyone 💓💓

In this week’s lecture, I learn about roles of universities to achieve sustainable development objectives and how Covid impact to the universities and sustainable development agendas. 

First of foremost, in national philosophy of education of Malaysia stated that education is an on-going effort towards further developing the potential of an individuals in a holistic and integrated manner, so as to produce individuals who are intellectually, spiritually, emotionally and physically balanced and harmonic, based on the firm believed in and devotion to God. However due to pandemic, some of the agenda have to be changed to suit the situation. The factory mass teaching methods of the third revolution era have failed to conquer enduring problems of inequity and unfairness. 

During post-Covid 19, the education is based on humanity (vision), heart (understanding), high touch (clarity) and, humility (agility). Institutional sustainability is where campus operations (teaching and learning), research (research and innovation) and curriculum (community engagement) independent to each other. There are 5 things of learning for sustainability which are learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, learning to be and learning to become. In my opinion, universities should create and review policy alternatives and implementation directions, and they can also track progress of the SDGs. Students should also be active in the co-creation of an academic environment and resources that facilitate learning in the SDGs. 

Therefore, in contributing to the SDGs through research, universities should promote a wide variety of research methods needed to address SDGs, including interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, and will also encourage and promote SDGs as a subject of research within universities. Research for sustainability is needed as to improve better living in life than before. For example, the innovation of chocolate filling machine in food industry to increase production. There are 4 requirement of research for sustainability are appropriateness, affordability, accessibility and availability. Lastly community engagement for sustainability is universities have now been given a new mission to transfer technologies, in addition to their traditional mission of research and education. The idea of industry-university cooperation has thus gained social recognition. 

Therefore, what is the role of individual for sustainable development ?

First of foremost, we need to do 3R which are reduce, reuse and recycle.

Reduce

There are many things that we can reduce, for example the consumption of electric city by simply turning off everything if we do not use it. It is because sometimes we become so forgetful to even turn off our fan or air conditioner before we leave.

Reuse

There are many things that we can reuse for example our old clothes and turn it into cleaning tools. Not only that, we also can reuse our plastic bottles and turn it into pencil case container

Recycle

There are many things that we can recyle such as our old newspaper and boxes. Somehow there are some places that have recycling center, which then we can also generate income through it. 

Here are some tips on how to practice 3R at home :