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UPM-COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT: EXPLORING SERVICE LEARNING VIA

MULTIMEDIA APPLICATION

Hizmawati Madzin1*, Siti Khadijah2 , Rafidah Sadaruddin3, Ng Seng Beng4

1,2,4 Dr., Universiti Putra Malaysia, MALAYSIA,

[hizmawati,ctkhadijah,ngsengbeng @upm.edu.my]
3 Universiti Putra Malaysia, MALAYSIA, rafidah@upm.edu.my

Abstract

UPM-Community engagement is incorporated into a university multimedia course by way of

a project that has both learning and community action goals. This project is designed via
collaboration between faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology (CSIT) and
PERNIM HIV orphanage centre as community partner. HIV orphanage can be categorize as
children who became an orphan because one or both parents died from AIDS. These
children are sensitive and high risk to have AIDS. However it is significant for the HIV
orphanage to have strong linkage with the community to encourage them to have better
education and obtain great life support from the community.

Under UPM-Community engagement, students who join Multimedia Application

Development course will learn to create creative multimedia content such as video, image
and sound using authoring tool. In this project engagement, there were series of service
learning activities done by CSIT lecturers and students. They teach the HIV orphanage
children in creating multimedia contents using several authoring tools. This service learning
approach give opportunity to the students to contribute their knowledge to the community.
One of the activities is train the trainer concept, where students guide the orphanage
children to be a mentor which can teach multimedia contents to other unfortunate children in
different orphanage centre. On top of that, there is also an activity that the orphanage draw
image using computer and print the design on white shirt. This create great experience to
the orphanage which can wear the product that they design. This will help them to increase
their skill and self esteem. Moreover it gives the students experiential opportunities to learn
in real world contexts and develop skills of community engagement, on how to handle
orphanage and also HIV patient.

UPM-Community engagement project is a service learning approach that expose

multimedia applications to the students and HIV orphanage and the learning through
community engagement benefits students, faculty, communities, and UPM. However the
effectiveness measurement of this service learning approach is required in order to know the
impact of learning multimedia content towards HIV orphanage.

Keywords: Learning Service approach, HIV Orphanage child, community engagement