¹Gunasegaran Karuppannan,²Buvaneswary Balasubramaniam,³Fazal Mohamed Mohamed Sultan

¹Assoc. Prof. Dr. in Faculty of Education and Social Sciences, UNISEL

²Master of Education, Faculty of Education and Social Sciences, UNISEL

³Assoc. Prof. Dr. in Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, UKM

DOI : https://doi.org/10.47191/ijsshr/v4-i8-05

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ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many educational institutes across the world to change dramatically. Teaching and learning have been undertaken remotely and on various digital platforms. In Malaysia, schools were closed for more than 6 months in the second quarter of 2020 and again experiencing school closure in May 2021. Education Ministry of Malaysia (MOE) strongly encouraged all government schools, especially the teachers and students, to use various online communications platforms to ensure the educational process remains uninterrupted. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has generated considerable challenges for the teaching and learning in government schools especially in secondary schools while using such emerging technologies. This research has two main goals. First, this journal will be analysing whether the online learning platforms used by secondary school teachers to conduct lessons during the COVID-19 period have presented any challenges to their student’s learning. Secondly, the paper will then go on to address proposed solutions by developing a conceptual model to reduce the impact of such challenges. An exploratory qualitative approach will be carried out in this research, supported by literature review techniques. The data set for this journal was collected between May to June 2021 during the third wave of pandemics in Malaysia. The data gathered by interviewing various secondary school teachers in Selangor. A total of 10 teachers participated in this interview process. Those teachers interviewed disclosed various obstacles they faced when they began to use information technology platforms for their online lessons, especially the new technological platforms. These obstacles include (a) overloaded work and information. (b) unfamiliarity and inability to learn of the new online learning platform, and (c) personal health challenges related to stress and anxiety.

KEYWORDS:

pandemic, education, challenges, online learning, Covid-19, qualitative, technology

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VOlUME 04 ISSUE 08 August 2021