integration of e-learning in teaching & learning by Mohamed Amin Embi
1. Integration of e-Learning in Teaching & Learning in Malaysian Higher Education Institutions By: Prof. Dr. Mohamed Amin Embi
2. Key Findings of Integration of e-Learning in Teaching & Learning In general, 42.3% or 11 HEIs are offering more than 50% of their courses online. A total of 15.4% or four HEIs offer 0–10% online courses, 11.5% or three HEIs offer 11–20% online courses; 11.5 % or three HEIs offer 21–30% online courses, 11.5% or three HEIs offer 31–40% online courses, while 7.7% or two HEIs offer 41–50% courses online. The most popular e-Learning mode among the HEIs is the supplementary mode followed by the blended mode. The percentage of courses offered through the blended mode by lecturers are between 1–80%. The percentage of online courses taken by students is 81–100%.
3. Most of the lecturers (73.5%) believed that there is an increase in e-Learning activities in the past two years. Most students access their online courses once a week (37.7%), followed by those who access it once daily (29.6%), and those who access it several times a day (17.6%). The number of students who have not accessed their online courses is very small, i.e. 135 or 2.1%. Most students (71.4%) access their online courses from the hostel, followed by those who access it the computer laboratory (50.2%) and those who access it from home (46.9%). Most students use their own laptops to access online courses (94.2%), using the wifi network available at their respective campuses (63.7%).
4. Only 13.8% lecturers provide more than 80% online learning materials. Most of the lecturers (79.1%) provide between 10% to 80% online learning materials. The main file formats provided by lecturers and accessed by students are common files such as pdf, ppt, doc, and xls files (96.8%). Only a few multimedia files are available (21.3%). Most lecturers (50.1%) prefer to upload materials on a weekly basis before classes begin. This seems to be the most preferred way by most students (44.6%). However, most students (84.7%) prefer to read the materials offline rather than online.
5. In terms of online assessments, 40.3% of the lecturers surveyed do not conduct online assessments, while 28.2% conduct 0–10% online assessments, and 17.2% conduct 11–20% online assessments. Only 14.3% of the lecturers surveyed conduct more than 20% online assessments. For most students (30.9%), only 11–20% of their course assessments are conducted online. For 26% of them, 0–10% of their course assessments are conducted online and for another 26%, over 20% of their course assessments are conducted online.
6. Most of the lecturers (93.4%) surveyed believe that the integration of e-Learning in their courses have been beneficial to students. Most of the lecturers (88.5%) surveyed also believe that the use of e-Learning has a positive impact on the performance of their students. Half of the lecturers (52.4%) surveyed are of the view that the integration of e-Learning in their institution is still at the middle stage, and slightly more than half of the students (56.8%) surveyed believed that the integration of e-Learning in their respective institutions are at the middle stage.
7. Two major challenges faced by lecturers to integrate e-Learning in their teaching and learning are trying to balance between teaching and research (59.8%) and time constraints (54.9%). Technophobia (13%) was the least responsible challenge among the challenges faced by lecturers in order to integrate e-Learning. For students, the challenges they face in the virtual environment are lack of access (53.4%), feedback from lecturers taking too long (42.8%), lack of content (32.7%), takes too long (32.4%), lack of interesting content (31.3 %), and uninteresting content as compared to applications such as Facebook. Only 294 students (4.7%) felt that technophobia is the main problem.