The impact of building community and digital skills on students’ online active learning experience during COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Covid-19 and the subsequent Movement Control Order (MCO) imposed by the government has deeply impacted the higher education institutions in Malaysia. The new normal has dramaticallytransformed to online learning. Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) took the bold move to be among the first universities in Malaysia to start online learning to ensure that students can continue with their education and graduation as anticipated. Whilst academics have done a remarkable job in putting together materials and assessments in preparation for online delivery of courses, the university must ensure quality and fair assessment as well as how well they have fared in the face of a major catastrophe. Accordingly, evaluations should be carried regularly, especially from the perspectives of students. The purpose of this paper is to explore the online learning experience of international undergraduate students on philosophy course. The paper adopted educational action research method by developing and distributing a questionnaire using google forms to collect data from 88 students in two international sections during the academic year 2020/2021. The results showed that although the majority of students rate their overall online experience as “excellent”, however, 60% of them think that their learning outcome could have been better if the study was face to face. Regarding the teaching modes, the preferred selection of majority of students was hybrid, synchronous, and asynchronous modes respectively. Moreover, the findings indicated that that students are still coping with the new norms working from thehome, but they had dissatisfaction with certain elements such as missing the face-to-face interaction and the challenge to carry out collaborative group projects while dispersed in different places. The findings provide updated insights on online learning after being adopted as a new norm during the COVID-19 pandemic and applied in UTM ever since, as such, can be useful for the university management, educators’ best practices, and similar higher education institutions to enhance and develop new online teaching and learning plans.