Incorporating & evaluating soft skills in community service courses

Abstract

The incorporation and evaluation of soft skills like teambuilding, communication, critical thinking and problem solving, leadership, lifelong learning, entrepreneurship, and professional values and ethics have become an engaging agenda among the public universities spearheaded by the Ministry of Higher Learning. The above seven thrusts of soft skills are viewed to be critical to the emphasis placed by the ministry to develop graduates who must go through a holistic education in order to be more employable domestically as well as internationally. This paper is an ongoing research done on the community service courses offered by a number of public universities like USM, UMT, UNISZA, UNIMAS and UMS with the objective of searching the best practice amongst these universities with regard to determining their learning outcomes, teaching strategies and the various modes of evaluation to instill lifelong habits of social responsibility. The ultimate aim of the research will be the creation of the best model that will be helpful in developing and maintaining a sense of social responsibility among graduates throughout their term of education and beyond that in the years that follow. One of the challenges faced in carrying out this ongoing research is finding the best fit among the various methods of inculcating the above soft skills on the students. Another challenge is on maintaining a fair and standard evaluation of the students' performance in their social service activities. The research so far has shown that the community benefits a lot from the students' community service ventures as the activities cut across different cultures and backgrounds. Students get to create smart partnerships with NGO's and also some government agencies to implement social service programs either with university funds or self-generated funds.