Alhamdulillah, me and my team won the IIUM Eminent Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL) Award 2026.
Even typing that still feels slightly surreal.
Because if you think there was some grand master plan behind all of this — there wasn't.
I did not wake up one morning and decide:
"I am going to build an award-winning teaching innovation."
Definitely not.
I was just trying to teach entrepreneurship better.
And somehow, after years of experimenting, changing things, collecting evidence, writing papers, entering competitions, making mistakes, fixing those mistakes, changing things AGAIN and probably creating additional work for myself...
I ended up here.
So, this is the slightly less glamorous story of how I won an Eminent SoTL Award.
It Started Because I Wasn't Satisfied With Teaching Entrepreneurship From Slides
I teach entrepreneurship.
And entrepreneurship is one of those subjects where you can teach students all the theories in the world — Business Model Canvas, marketing, financial management, customer segmentation, value proposition and so on.
Students can memorise everything.
They can even get an A.
But can they actually sell something?
That is a completely different question.
Because suddenly there is a real customer standing in front of you.
Nobody cares that your assignment rubric says your value proposition is excellent.
The customer can simply say:
"Tak nak."
🤣
And THAT is entrepreneurship education.
Students need to experience rejection.
They need to realise that the Instagram post they spent three hours designing might get five likes.
They need to manage teammates who disappear.
They need to calculate money.
They need to deal with customers.
They need to experience the excitement of making their first sale.
And sometimes they need to experience the horror of realising that they made sales... but somehow have no idea where the money went.
Those experiences are difficult to reproduce through PowerPoint slides.
That thinking eventually became what we now call EntrepWeek.
EntrepWeek Wasn't Born Looking Like EntrepWeek
This is something people don't always see when they look at a finished teaching innovation.
They see the framework.
The diagrams.
The numbers.
The awards.
The publications.
Everything looks very intentional.
In reality?
It evolved.
A LOT.
EntrepWeek started from entrepreneurship activities and physical bazaars and gradually became a structured experiential learning ecosystem embedded within our entrepreneurship courses.
Then COVID happened.
Suddenly, the way we had been doing things couldn't continue in the same way.
So we adapted.
Digital entrepreneurship became much more important.
Social media became part of the learning environment.
Students learned how to promote businesses online.
We incorporated external training.
We changed assessments.
We introduced new activities.
Then we changed some of them again.
And again.
Every semester I would look at something and think:
"Hmm... this part doesn't really work."
Then I would change it.
Sometimes the new version worked.
Sometimes...
Well.
It created another problem.
😂
Then we fixed THAT problem.
Looking back, I realise that this constant dissatisfaction was actually one of the most important parts of my SoTL journey.
I didn't realise it at the time.
I thought I was just being fussy.
Then I Realised: Wait... This Is Data
For a long time, my thinking was basically:
"Okay, students seem to like this."
Or:
"This assignment works better."
Or the dreaded:
"Why are they STILL doing this wrong?"
Every lecturer knows that feeling.
You explain something.
You put it on Moodle.
You announce it in class.
You remind them.
You probably put it in bold.
And somehow...
"Dr, bila deadline?"
ðŸ˜
But eventually my questions became more systematic.
Instead of simply asking whether students liked an activity, I started asking:
Did they actually learn from it?
What evidence do I have?
What changed after I introduced an intervention?
What problems keep appearing?
What happens if I redesign the assessment?
Can I measure the difference?
Can I document it?
Can I research it?
And that was probably the moment when my teaching innovation started becoming Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
Without realising it, I had started building a cycle:
Teach → Observe → Find Problem → Change Something → Collect Evidence → Reflect → Improve → Repeat
Then eventually:
Research it.
Publish it.
Share it.
And then...
Repeat everything again next semester because apparently I enjoy creating work for myself.
😂
The Numbers Slowly Became Quite Crazy
This is another funny thing.
When you're running something semester after semester, you don't always realise how big it has become.
You're too busy worrying about the next class, the next bazaar, the next assessment, the next student problem and whatever emergency has appeared that week.
Then one day you add everything together.
And you go:
"Eh... banyaknya."
Over the years, EntrepWeek has reached more than 1,700 learners.
Students have generated more than RM1.7 million in cumulative sales.
Thousands of digital learning certificates have been produced.
The programme expanded beyond university students into entrepreneurship training involving communities including B40 participants, asnaf and single mothers.
What began as a way to make my entrepreneurship classes more experiential had slowly turned into an ecosystem involving:
Teaching.
Industry.
Community.
Research.
Innovation.
Digital learning.
And eventually, scholarship.
The philosophy behind it became:
Learn. Earn. Return.
Students learn entrepreneurial knowledge and skills.
They earn through actual entrepreneurial experience.
And eventually, they return knowledge and value to society.
That philosophy also helped me connect entrepreneurship education to something much bigger than simply "teaching students how to make money."
It became about humanising education, creating value and understanding entrepreneurship as something that can contribute to society.
Then Came the Competitions
Eventually, I started submitting the work to competitions and awards.
This part was another learning experience entirely.
Because apparently having a good project is not enough.
You also need to know how to explain why it is good.
😂
EntrepWeek and its related innovations gradually received recognition through competitions such as IIDEL, iCompex, the Malaysia Digital Transformation Awards and others.
One particularly meaningful milestone was becoming a finalist for Anugerah Khas YB Menteri Pendidikan Tinggi: Reka Bentuk Kurikulum dan Penyampaian Inovatif (AKRI) 2025.
The work was also recognised through IIUM's Best Teaching Innovation Award.
Every competition forced me to look at the programme differently.
What exactly is innovative about this?
What evidence demonstrates impact?
Can it be replicated?
Is it sustainable?
How has it evolved?
What makes it different from simply organising a bazaar?
Those questions were sometimes uncomfortable.
But they made the programme stronger.
Somewhere Along the Way, Teaching Became Scholarship
This is probably the biggest lesson from my journey.
For years, I thought I was "just improving my teaching."
But teaching innovation and SoTL are slightly different things.
You can create the most exciting classroom activity in the world.
That does not automatically make it scholarship.
The scholarship happens when you start systematically investigating what is happening.
You collect evidence.
You analyse it.
You connect your observations to literature.
You document the intervention.
You reflect.
You share what you learned so other educators can learn from it too.
Suddenly, the things happening inside your classroom can become:
Research questions.
Conference presentations.
Teaching cases.
Frameworks.
Publications.
Innovations.
And eventually...
a body of scholarship.
And Then I Had to Prepare the Eminent SoTL Submission
This was when something clicked for me.
Preparing the portfolio forced me to look backwards.
Not at one semester.
Not at one project.
But at the entire journey.
And suddenly I could see connections that I hadn't really noticed while I was busy doing the work.
One teaching problem led to an intervention.
The intervention generated evidence.
The evidence led to another improvement.
That improvement created another research question.
The research became a publication.
The innovation was presented elsewhere.
Feedback came back.
The programme evolved again.
The pieces were connected.
And I realised:
Oh.
I've actually been doing SoTL all this time.
😂
The Award Application Wasn't Really About 2026
This is something I wish more lecturers knew.
When an award announcement comes out, it is tempting to think:
"Okay, what can I do this year so I can apply?"
But I don't think that's how a strong SoTL portfolio is built.
My 2026 submission was not really about what I accomplished in 2026.
It represented years of accumulated work.
Semester after semester.
Student after student.
Experiment after experiment.
Some successful.
Some... we shall quietly never repeat again.
😂
The award application simply gave me a reason to gather all those pieces and finally tell the story properly.
If You Want to Build Your Own SoTL Journey...
My biggest advice is surprisingly boring:
Keep evidence of EVERYTHING.
Seriously.
That random Excel file?
Keep it.
Student feedback?
Keep it.
Screenshots?
Keep them.
Old versions of your assessments?
KEEP THEM.
Photos from activities?
Keep them.
Data from your LMS?
Download it.
Reflection notes?
Write them down.
Because three years later you might suddenly realise:
"WAIT. I need evidence of what we did in Semester 1, 2023."
And then you will find yourself digging through Google Drive at 2 a.m. questioning every decision you have ever made.
Ask me how I know.
🤣
But more importantly, keep asking questions about your teaching.
Why isn't this working?
Why did students perform better this semester?
What changed?
Can I test that?
Can I collect evidence?
Can I turn this into research?
Can someone else benefit from what I've learned?
Those little questions accumulate.
So... How Did I Win the Eminent SoTL Award?
I wish I could give you a magical formula.
I can't.
There was no single brilliant idea.
There wasn't one revolutionary semester.
And there definitely wasn't a perfectly executed master plan.
It was years of:
Teaching.
Trying something.
Realising something wasn't working.
Changing it.
Trying again.
Collecting evidence.
Writing.
Publishing.
Presenting.
Getting feedback.
Winning some competitions.
Not winning others.
Going back.
Improving again.
And repeating the whole thing.
Over and over.
Until one day, apparently, that collection of slightly obsessive attempts to improve my teaching had a name:
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
And in 2026, it earned me the IIUM Eminent Scholarship of Teaching & Learning Award.
I am incredibly grateful for the recognition.
But I think the award also taught me something about academia that I want to remember.
Sometimes we are so busy doing the work that we don't realise we are building something.
We only see the next class.
The next deadline.
The next problem.
The next semester.
Then one day, we stop and look backwards.
And suddenly there is a body of work behind us.
So perhaps the biggest thing I learned from winning this award is this:
You don't have to perfect your teaching to practise SoTL.
You just have to remain curious enough to keep studying it.
And maybe slightly stubborn enough to keep trying to make it better.
In my case...
very stubborn.
😂
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