The Empowering of Technology and Innovation for the Sustainability of Intangible Resources in Malaysia Through Open Distance Education

Technology has “two sides of a same coin”. Technology and digitalization transformation are inevitable in the 21st century because it has been in every aspect of life, where 21st century is called a time period known as VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity), due to its robust, and dynamic characteristics. Rising technological wave such as Industrial Revolution 5.0 (IR 5.0), Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI), smartphones, laptops, 5G network etc. has been galvanizing changes and innovation across the globe. Nevertheless, rapid development has caused several irreversible damages to the cultural and environmental aspect, such as global warming, environmental degradation, loss of natural and intangible living cultural values and resources, etc. Nevertheless, these issues could be better monitored and managed with technology, and educational efforts. This paper focuses on the benefits of intangible living cultural, using the stated preference approach, single-bounded contingent valuation method. A total respondent of 291 was collected for this study and the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for intangible living cultural by both users and non-users is estimated to be MYR7.19 per day with sociodemographic of income, education level and marital status are significant with the WTP for this study. The results of this paper would be able to provide an insight to various stakeholders on the adaptability, possibility of leveraging on the open distance educational digital transformation in empowering national intangible cultural resources in Malaysia.