Online Content Compliments The Students Learning Process

The development of technology has changed the dynamics of education. This includes the changing of how we gain information and knowledge. Nowadays, a lot of creative content has been created on social media, especially Youtube, for people to gain information and knowledge. AJAR as one of the content creation companies in Malaysia are utilising social media to share knowledge and educate people by creating educational content videos. Contents especially related to education have helped to give understanding and attract students towards science. In this article, we interviewed Mr. Muhammad Haziq bin Abd Rahim, the founder of AJAR to share about their journey and experience in creating educational video.

From Engineering To Youtubers

Mr. Haziq started his journey as content creator for educational video in 2017, after he graduated from University of Sheffield, United Kingdom in Master of Mechanical Engineering. His passion towards Science and changing the world drove him to create an educational video for students to gain additional knowledge out of school syllabus. This type of educational video content has been produced a lot in developed countries. However,  it’s still new in Malaysia and not so much science content has been exposed to the society especially in Malay language. Therefore, he created his Youtube channel called AJAR as a platform for him to share knowledge with society using the Malay language as a medium of communication. His goal is to nurture the younger generation to appreciate multi-disciplinary knowledge and spark their curiosity. He believes synergy between subjects such as Mathematics, Science, History, Arts and Language is important to attract students to appreciate knowledge. In the beginning, his video content was focusing only on topics for secondary school students. But after receiving overwhelming response from different levels of audience, he started to expand the topic of discussion to the general audience. As his audience continued to increase, he faced several challenges in creating the video.

Challenge On Creating Educational Video

Since 2017, Mr. Haziq created his educational videos all by himself starting from creating the content, video editing and marketing. His video content is based on the topic that he is interested in and gives a benefit to the audience. In Youtube, virality is the key factor of a successful channel. As Youtubers, they need to create content that will be viral so they will get more viewers for their channel. The more viewers they get, the more people will subscribe to their channel to gain knowledge. At the same time it helps them to generate their income for their operations. To create a video with high number of viewers, he needs to come up with novel ideas or choose topics that are very close to the target audience such as Scientific concepts or technology that has been introduced in comics or animation. In addition, he continues to experiment with his content by merging literature topics with science. For this, he has produced a video about the relationship between Classic Malay Riddle and Science. To date, AJAR already has 362,000 subscribers for their Youtube channel and the videos are being watched by viewers from different nationalities and ages.

Expanding And Moving Forward

After four years of making this educational video on Youtube, AJAR is currently expanding their platform to attract more audiences. AJAR has just produced their first educational comic titled ‘Tempur Nombor’ which they collaborated with one of the Malaysian top book publication companies. This comic is promoting mathematical concepts to attract younger generation to understand more about mathematics. Not only that, during this pandemic situation, AJAR also produced their first online science magazine which provides a lot of science information and experiment activities that students can do by themselves at home. For Mr. Haziq, AJAR fills in the gap in Malaysian education which requires more additional content for students to learn and helps students to understand how science is applied in reality. His last quote is “We are a big group of collaborators which bring betterment to our education system”.