A Pandemic Look Back and Forward: Case Studies of Teaching and Learning With Digital Technology in a Malaysian University

Due to the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in early 2020, the sudden and unplanned closure of many academic institutions worldwide caused more than a billion learners to be out of the classrooms. Many educational institutions pivoted from onsite to online learning to cope with the unprecedented circumstances. In this paper, I reflect on how the pandemic changed the learning landscape of one public university in Malaysia. Several crucial steps the university took to ensure academic continuity for students and academics during the closure are highlighted. Tips on tweaking onsite lessons to accommodate the online learning environment are provided. Some empirical data collected from students who were directly affected from the day the country went into a total lockdown on 18 March 2020 until its gradual transition back to onsite learning in late March 2022 were also shared. This paper reports on a case of university course with content analysis on students' blog and report writings to capture the reflections and experience of how students coped during the campus closure. Then questionnaire was distributed to another course case to reveal how we moved forward when the campus was reopened in stages at Universiti Putra Malaysia on conducting lessons in a hybrid flexible (HyFlex) learning mode in a low-tech classroom. Some lessons were learned from the pandemic as teaching-learning returns to some form of normalcy were listed. In sum, the case studies present two consecutive cases to show the innovative transformation and implication process of using information technology in higher education in emergency.

關鍵字

online teaching transitions in a pandemic ； blended learning ； university course redesign ； case study

並列摘要

新冠肺炎疫情在2020年初爆發，全世界許多學術機構為因應突如其來且措手不及的事件而暫時關閉，迫使超過十億的學習者和教師離開實體教室，為因應前所未有的情況，許多學術機構從實體學習轉為線上學習。本篇演講提出個案研究法的成果，首先呈現疫情初啟時，馬來西亞的一所公立大學因疫情而改變教學與學習環境的關鍵措施，目標為確保學生在校園關閉期間能維持學習的連續性，並說明如何微調實體課程以帶入完全線上學習環境的經驗。個案一乃是從2020年3月中馬來西亞全國緊急封鎖至3月底，當實體課程直接轉化到完全線上的緊急歷程，收集學生部落格學習週記等文字資料，以內容分析學生在家完全線上學習的優缺點，以評估課程轉化設計之結果。個案二是在疫情緩和、逐漸回歸正常教學與學習的時期，以問卷調查法收集學生在低度科技設備教室，實施混成彈性模式（hybrid flexible）的經驗，說明師生從疫情線上學習轉回到新常態教學所學到的功課。總之，本研究呈現兩個具先後時序的課堂案例，希望呈現當代大學課堂使用數位科技之緊急變化歷程。

並列關鍵字

疫情期間線上教學模式轉換；混成學習；大學課程再設計；個案研究

參考文獻

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