COVID-19 and Online Teaching Challenges Of Stem Courses In UiTM Pahang
Abstract
The outbreak of COVID-19 was unexpected, and it forced UiTM Pahang to launch live online programs of a total of 288 undergraduate online courses in order to ensure the normal teaching operation, with 5,771 students stay at homes in 2020. It is a massive, disruptive shift to move all the existing courses online in matter of days. In general, a complete online course requires an elaborate lesson plan design, teaching materials such as audio and video contents, as well as technology support teams. However, due to the sudden emergence of the COVID-19, most faculty members are facing the challenges of lacking online teaching experience, early preparation, or support from educational technology teams, especially for the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses. In addition to the challenges to the faculty, the students themselves tend to have ambiguous future career goals, lack active academic involvement, and spend more time in-class study compared with out-class study according to their study time. Students often have problems such as lack of self-discipline, suitable learning materials, or good learning environment when they are self-isolated at home. The aim of this paper is to review on those problem presented above and discuss how faculty can implement effective instructional strategies to prevent negative learning attitudes of UiTM Pahang students and ensure the effectiveness of online education on STEM courses.
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