Investigating Learner's Perceptions About the Improvement in Communication Skills Through Online Learning: A Case Study of QUEST, Nawabshah, Sindh, Pakistan.

Abstract

Undoubtedly, it is fundamental truth and fact accepted by all the academicians, scholars, teachers, learners, and educators that communication skills play the very significant role in the lives of people to achieve their goals. However, the current century only stands on the pillar of technology which has revolutionized the educational systems across the globe and has changed the ways of teaching and learning process. By keeping such scenario and change in educational systems of the 21^st century in account, the present study carried out on knowing the perceptions of Engineering students of QUEST, NAWABSHAH about learning of communication skills through online process and also highlighted the problems students face while taking online classes. Total no samples were 100, 27 were female students while 73 were male participants which were selected from three different engineering departments of QUEST, NAWABSHAH including 33 participants from Chemical, 33 participants from Telecommunication, and 34 participants from Energy & Environment Department by employing the simple random sampling technique.

Additionally, quantitative method was used to collect data from the respondents in which 20 close-ended questionnaires were asked by implying the five-point Likert scale. Researcher adapted 10 close-ended questionnaires for data collection from the survey of Sugito, Sir Mulyani, ES, Hartono, Superatono (2017) “Enhancing Students’ Communication Skills through Problem Posing and Presentation,” plus 10 questionnaires were created by researcher himself. Collected data was analyzed through SPSS version 26 in which descriptive statistics were drawn to show the result in form of frequency, percentage, accumulative percentage, and pie diagrams. After finishing with SPSS analysis, researcher interpreted the data separately of each item. Overall Results of the study concluded that the perception of learners towards online learning is positive. However, learners really face some serious problems in online learning, problems such as, connectivity problem, electricity problem, schedule problem, noise problems, hesitation problem, confidence problem, interaction problem, criticism problem, presentation problem, and so on and so forth. On the basis of findings of this research study, researcher suggests that more research studies on this area are needed in order to aware the learners about online learning and make them familiarize with global teaching and learning processes, especially in the context of Pakistani engineering universities.