ABSTRACT
This study explores First Year Engineering students' perceptions towards online speaking assessment amidst COVID-19 pandemic. To ensure that the education process remained uninterrupted during the pandemic, schools and higher learning institutions were forced to shift to full time remote teaching and learning which has indirectly impacted assessment and evaluation of all courses. This study aims to examine first year engineering students' views on their experience having online speaking assessment amidst covid-19 pandemic. Investigating students' perceptions as the end user towards online assessment is highly crucial to determine the effectiveness of teaching and learning. A quantitative method of study was conducted with questionnaire derived from Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was adopted to collect responses from 163 undergraduate Diploma engineering students doing their first semester in Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Malaysia. The key findings indicated that the students were well receptive of online speaking assessment and were fully ready to have online speaking assessment in the future. The study also discovered that students' perceived self-efficacy towards online speaking assessment was low and there was significant difference in perceptions between students from rural and students from urban area on online speaking assessment. This study is important to higher learning institutions to serve as a guide in making planning related to implementation of online speaking assessment during the pandemic. This research is also significant for its contribution towards language teaching practices in higher learning institution and will be helpful for the educators to identify ways to enhance students' online assessment experience for an effective teaching and learning. Copyright © 2022 Wolters Kluwer Medknow Publications. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Due to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-COV-2) or COVID-19 pandemic, the education sector in Malaysia opted for the practice of online communication as a new norm. However, even during the pandemic, teachers in Malaysia are obliged to involve with professional development (henceforth, PD) activities for at least 42 hours annually. This article is prepared from a preliminary study to report the motivating factors and barriers on teachers' PD activities during Malaysia's Movement Control Order (henceforth, MCO). Also, this article studied the prevalence and trend of the teachers' online communication during the period. A survey was conducted as a pilot study on 35 teachers from Sri Laksamana Primary School (henceforth, SLPS) in Melaka. The data gained were analysed descriptively using the SPSS software. In general, the results indicate that teachers are motivated to involve with online PD activities by getting rewarded with annual performance evaluation marks, which is beneficial for their career mileage. Next, the most significant barrier for their online PD is time limitation due to other workloads. In conclusion, even though the teachers are well-accepting online PD activities, teachers should be given a higher portion of evaluation marks regarding their annual PD involvement than the current five per cent portion. Next, the school's administrators should act on teachers' work distribution issues that became the main challenge for effective online PD, thus creating a favourable working ecosystem. © Authors This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4 0)