Murid²NEWS - Students' choice

Students' choice - Learn at School

Saturday, April 18, 2020

11:30PM MYT

Petaling Jaya – April 18: Technology has been improving over decades, so has education systems. Following up with the era, education institutions are starting to implement online classes for students.

However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the education institutions have no choice but to lockdown and change its form of teaching to a fully online mode. This is new way of learning to a lot of students, especially for those who hardly tried online learning before the pandemic.

“I started online few years ago, it was partially online. As it is in mixed in-class and online class. Now I am taking fully online class and it just started 9 weeks ago due to COVID-19,” Mun Qin, a student from Beijing Normal University stated. According to the survey, 33 out of 50 students are new to online classes, which is seemingly due to the pandemic.

Due to the sudden change in medium of learning, students are finding it difficult to cope with. “My experience with online classes until this stage is not really favourable as there is always some audio distraction during the classes,” Angie, a student from YTL International College mentioned. In the survey conducted, 92% of the 50 participants think that face-to-face classes are easier to understand.

This is an infographic of data collected through survey. Link to interactive infographic: https://create.piktochart.com/output/45823376-untitled-infographic

Workloads has also increased for students because teachers are trying to make sure that students are catching up with the lessons. “Our teacher is worried that we cannot follow up our lessons, so teacher will give us a lot of task to make sure that we are on the right pace,” said Mun Qin.

Also, 66% of the students who have conducted the survey claimed that online classes are more time-consuming. The time consumed by online-classes are mainly tasks and assessments, whereas for face-to-face classes, it is the transportation that is time-consuming. Angie mentioned that it takes time to travel from home to college, and that she couldn’t return home during the huge time slot between classes.

This is an infographic of data collected through survey. Link to interactive infographic: https://create.piktochart.com/output/45823376-untitled-infographic

The choice made by students is obvious, among 50 participants, 44 prefer in-class and only 6 of them prefer online classes. 76% of the 50 students think that face-to-face classes are more enjoyable, mainly because of the interaction with students and teachers. Both the interviewees prefer in-class lessons because they can interact and communicate directly with their tutors or lecturers.

However, students do prefer a merge between face-to-face classes and online classes if it is possible. “The practical classes will be more suitable to conduct face-to-face, and theory classes can be done through online,” said Angie.