Students' Reactions to Online Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of a Malaysian Private University's Outcome Unit

Abstract

COVID-19, a highly contagious disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus-2, has infected over 3 million people worldwide to date. The only way to stop the virus from spreading is avoiding close contact. Hence, the conventional teaching and learning environment was transformed from face-to-face to online education through Zoom, personal to interactive, and seminars to webinars. However, the impacts and feedbacks from the students are unknown. Therefore, this survey study was conducted to evaluate the responses from students. The selected study unit is CVE40004 Water Engineering, an outcome unit with complex engineering problem offered in Swinburne University of Technology Malaysia Sarawak Campus. The teaching pedagogical approaches that had been adopted are crossover learning, context-based learning, computational thinking, and adaptive teaching. Most of the students proclaimed that learning quality, effectiveness, interest and comfortability were reduced significantly after attending online classes. With adequate computer skills and facilities, most of the students still felt isolated and faced difficulties in communicating with group members. It is believed that the situation and responses will get better after the students adapt to new online teaching and learning environment.