E learning offered in Malaysian universities: pros and cons from student perspective

Electronic learning (or E-Learning ) is a term for all types of technology-enhanced learning (TEL), where technology is used to support the learning process. Often the medium of instruction is through computer technology, particularly involving digital technologies. In some instances, no face- to- face interaction takes place. E-learning is used interchangeably in a wide variety of contexts. Lately, in most Universities, e-learning is used to define a specific mode to attend a course or programs of study where the students rarely, if ever, attend face-to-face for on-campus access to educational facilities, because they study online.

E-Learning lessons are generally designed to guide students through information or to help students perform in specific tasks. Information based e-Learning content communicates information to the student.
E-Learning can provide for major benefits for the organizations and individuals involved.

E-learning strategies that have been introduced into Malaysian public universities since 1996. Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) are the two Malaysian public universities planned to introduce e-learning strategies into their undergraduate programs. This analysis uses some 25 interviews with the teaching and administrative staff at UKM and UTM. A critical view of the problems that these universities face in implementing their vision statements is also presented. However, testing the vision statements against the experience and opinions of teaching staff is a significant task, because ultimately it is the teachers who will drive the e-learning strategies. If teachers are not supportive of these programs, e-learning will struggle to become established.

Pros and Cons of E-Learning
E-learning has shown its great advantages through its accessibility to all students irrespective of their residence. E-classes help students to communicate with their tutors, get clarifications regarding their subjects and study and access teaching materials through e-libraries. Universities and colleges which provide online degrees involve more and more electronic facilities to give their online students fast and qualified assistance. Students’ interactions have become much easier than face-to-face communication!

Another advantage of e-learning is its time flexibility. One can get online resources, communicate with his tutor or class mates, send his query and write term paper at any time he can get access to the Internet.

E-learning or networked learning has been becoming more and more popular among students living in developing and undeveloped countries. They can afford getting higher education degrees at respectable universities and colleges by saving extra expenses for traveling, accommodation, food and high fees for tutors. E-learning can offer such students much easier and affordable way to get a good education and a prestige higher degree.

However, there are still a few disadvantages in e-learning which are enough obvious to be omitted in this article. Lack of face-to-face communication with teachers contributes lack of understanding between a student and a teacher. While a teacher cannot easily feel a student’s demands, interests and motivations, a student can simply be lazy being non-motivated enough and having free time schedule for his e-learning. This may result a low scope of the student’s knowledge and the teacher’s accusation in lack of proficiency. Next, online classes, conferences and discussions are limited in time and totally exclude emotional interactivity. Though some universities and colleges which provide online courses and give online degrees evolve voice communication through networking technologies there is still lack of gestures, vivid dialogue and feeling of your interlocutor’s presence.

E-learning as it looks today leaves so many questions and demands regarding its improvement as it gets benefits. However, its fast growing shows a great future for online degrees. One of the most influential things which stimulate e-learning development is globalization through the Internet. The globalized world of computer technologies accepts people of different cultures irrespective of their origin, boundaries, genders, races, ages and sexes. E-learning has become an integral part of this e-world and welcomes everybody who has willingness to learn and get higher education.

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The application of pre-paid cash card for consumers

A prepaid cash card allows consumers to purchase something even when they don’t have the cash to pay for it. It benefits consumers in their everyday life.

Though it works almost the same like a credit card, a prepaid cash card is different because it allows consumers to have a better control over their finance. Prepaid cash cards offer advantages both in terms of limiting spending and fraud. The user of prepaid cash can load the amount of money they want onto their card but will be have spending limit.

For any purchases transaction, the sum will be subtracted from the card balance. You can always pump in more money when the balance runs low by transferring money from your regular checking or savings account.

The advantages of holding a Debit Card for a consumer are as follow:

1. Easy Payment
Debit Card is the simplest and most convenient way of making payment of goods and/or services purchased.

2. Convenience
The major advantage is that you need not require carrying bulky cash, as the small plastic is convenient to place in your wallet.

3. Replacement
In case your card is lost/stolen, you can immediately block the usage by informing the bank and get a replacement one.
4. Emergency Use
It is useful during emergency situations like shortage of cash, late night etc

5. Easy For Travelers
You can benefit from our International card if you are frequent traveler as it prevents hassles of foreign exchange.

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The threat of online security: How safe is our data?

Nowadays, people rely on computers to create, store and manage critical information. Consequently, it is important for users to aware that computer security plays a major role in protecting their data from loss, damage, and misuse. Similarly, online security has been online trader’s main concern in protecting their websites from potential threats.

Since the Internet is a public system in which every transaction can be tracked, logged, monitored and stored in many locations, it is important for businesses to understand possible security threats to their business.

Confidentiality, integrity, and availability are the three main concepts of security. First, confidentiality allows only authorized parties to read protected information. Second is integrity that ensures data remains as is from the sender to the receiver. Lastly is availability which is ensures you have access and are authorized to resources.

Evidence from variety of security surveys provides a mixed picture of cyber attacks and crimes in e-commerce. Some of the trends which had been collected by Computer Security Institute (CSI) and the San Francisco Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Computer Intrusion Squad through surveys include the following:

- Most of the organizations conduct security audits and employ a variety of technologies and procedures like antivirus software and firewalls to defend against cyber attacks. Between 65%-70% use access control lists, intrusion detection, and data encryption.

- Organizations still are reserved to report computer intrusions to legal authorities because they feared negative publicity or were worried that their competitors would use it against them.


There are many threats to e-commerce that may come from sources within an organization or individual. Followings are some of the potential security threats that can be found such as:

1. Sniffing the network - Here, the attacker monitors the data between the shopper’s computer and the server. He collects data about the shopper or steals personal information, such as credit card numbers.

2. Snooping the shopper’s computer - Most users’ knowledge of security vulnerabilities of their systems is vague at best. Additionally, software and hardware vendors, in their quest to ensure that their products are easy to install, will ship products with security features disabled. In most cases, enabling security features requires a non-technical user to read manuals written for the technologist. The confused user does not attempt to enable the security features. This creates a treasure trove for attackers.

3. Using known server bugs - The attacker analyzes the site to find what types of software are used on the site. He then proceeds to find what patches were issued for the software. Additionally, he searches on how to exploit a system without the patch. He proceeds to try each of the exploits. The sophisticated attacker finds a weakness in a similar type of software, and tries to use that to exploit the system. This is a simple, but effective attack.

4. Tricking the shopper - It is one of the easiest and most profitable attacks, also known as social engineering techniques. These attacks involve surveillance of the shopper’s behavior, gathering information to use against the shopper. For example, a mother’s maiden name is a common challenge question used by numerous sites. If one of these sites is tricked into giving away a password once the challenge question is provided, then not only has this site been compromised, but it is also likely that the shopper used the same logon ID and password on other sites.



Our advice is check your computers frequently for possible conficker infection as well as other vulnerabilities and take the appropriate action. Use protective security sofeware (antivirus, firewalls, and antiphishing tools) and keep up to date.

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Revenue model and comparison of Google, Ebay and Amazon

Revenue model outlines how the organizations or e-commerce companies will generate profits. 5 major revenue models nowadays are sales, transaction fees, subscription fees, advertising fees, affiliate fees, and other revenue sources.

Sales revenue model: A company gets the revenue by selling goods, information or services.

Transaction fee revenue model: A company receives a commission for enabling or executing a transaction. It is based on the volume of transactions made.

Subscription revenue model: A company charges a subscription fee for the users that access to the content and services offered.

Advertising revenue model: A company provides a forum for advertisements and receives fees from the companies that advertise their products.

Affiliate revenue model: A company receives commissions for referring customers to others web sites.

Google offers targeted advertising solutions and global Internet search solutions. Its principal products and services include:

Google AdWords: Google AdWords is a pay per click advertising program of Google designed to allow the advertisers to present advertisements to people at the instant the people are looking for information related to what the advertiser has to offer. When a user searches Google's search engine, ads for relevant words are shown as "sponsored link" on the right side of the screen, and sometimes above the main search results.

Pay per Click Advertising: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is the best way to send immediate, targeted traffic to your website. It is an online advertising payment model in which payment is based onqualifying click-throughs. An advertiser has to pay every time his ad receives a click.

Google AdSense: AdSense is an ad serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, video advertisements on their sites. Revenue is generated on a per-click or per-thousand-ads-displayed basis and the ads are administered by Google. AdSense program includes AdSense for search and AdSense for content.

Google’s new revenue model:Google is currently testing a new advertising program that pays site owners based on a Cost-Per-Click model. The program, called Cost-Per-Action, was revealed via an invitation e-mail from the Google AdSense team to Web site owners.

EBay is an online auction and shopping website in which people buy and sell goods and services worldwide. Buyers are allowed to browsing and bidding on items which free of charge, but the sellers will be charged. The charges are based on promotional fees, insertion fees and final value fees which are the main revenue of eBay.

Insertion fees : A nonrefundable fee which will be charged when an item listed on eBay. Where promotional fee will be charged for additional listing options that help attract attention for an item, such as bold listings or highlighted. Final value fee is a commission that charged to the seller at the end of the auction.

Promotional fees: Fees that charged for additional listing options that help attract attention for an item, such as highlighted or bold listings.

Final value fees: Commission that charged to the seller at the end of the auction.

Furthermore, Ebay generate revenue by sales revenue model through its subsidiary, Half.com, offers fixed price, person-to-person selling of goods, including books, CDs, videos and games, charging a 15% commission on completed sales.

Additionally, a portion of Ebay’s revenue also comes from direct advertising on the site, as well as end to end service providers whose services increase the speed of transactions. The acquisition of PayPal, whose products allow the exchange of money over the Internet, brings additional transaction based fee revenue.

Amazon was one of the first major companies to sell goods by Internet. Amazon generates revenue primarily by selling books, videos, electronics, and kitchen equipment on domestic and international Web sites, such as Amazon Marketplace.

Amazon Marketplace is Amazon.com’s fixed price online marketplace that allows sellers to offer their goods alongside Amazon’s offerings. Buyers can buy new and used items sold directly by a third party through Amazon.com using Amazon Marketplace. This sales strategy and program has been very profitable for Amazon.com.

Amazon charges a commission rate based on the sale price, a transaction fee, and a variable closing fee. Which are sales revenue model and transaction fee revenue model.Moreover, Amazon.com also generates revenue by Affiliate revenue model. Amazon was one of the first online businesses to set up an affiliate marketing program. AStore is an Amazon.com affiliate product which website owners can use to create an online store on their site. The store does not allow website owners to sell their own products directly. Website owners pick products from Amazon’s store and earn referral fees on the products purchased by their readers. The fee structure is currently the same as for the other affiliate links and ranges from 4% to 10% of the product price.

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ABOUT ME!!! Eric Lim Pei Chin

Hi everyone! Welcome to visit our blog! My name is ERIC Lim Pei Chin, 22 years old from Tangkak, Johor. I am currently pursuing Bachelor of Administration (Hons) Entrepreneurship in UTAR. My hobby is playing badminton and it can make my life become bright spark and meaningful. I like use online to chat and make more friends around me. Besides that,i also like to interact with my friends by the ways of shopping, singing karaoke, watch movie and chit-chat during my free time too. It brings me a lot of fun because I believe that it is a chance for me together with my friends during our college career. Due to the advanced technology nowadays, surfing the net is the most frequent activities to me as I can get a lot of news although I never stride over my doorstep.

The website I have visited the most is http://www.chinapress.com/. It is local newspaper website and it provides a lot of global, society and entertainment news. It is convenient to me to update my knowledge and save my newspaper fees too.

The second website I always visit is http://www.facebook.com. It is the most popular website nowadays. You can communicate with your friends in the global world by looking their recent picture they uploaded or the recent news they posted. It includes a lot of applications and interesting games.

Next website I like to visit is http://www.google.com/. I mostly use it when I am doing my assignment. It is the fastest and biggest search engine and allows to me search whatever information that I need during my assignments. Furthermore, I will check my mail box at http://www.yahoo.com every day. Lastly, I also keep updating myself with my course’s announcement at http://wble.utar.edu.my/. It is an intranet and allows me to check result,gain lecture notes and whether there are any updated posts. Finally, the activities i do through Internetas are chitchatting, watch online movie , learning, earning and of course obtaining knowledge.That is all about me. Have a nice day! =)

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