The unprecedented event of COVID-19 pandemic poses the real challenge to me as an academic. This is especially in maintaining the balance between striving to facilitate my students to achieve all the learning objectives for all the courses I conducted through online learning, and at the same time ensuring that the process of tarbiyyah (education) is not being jeopardised. First of all, the abrupt migration to online learning during the first part of Semester 2 in the 2019/2020 academic sessions due to Movement Control Order was itself an unexpected circumstance. All of the sudden I was again being confronted by yet another puzzle of practice.

As an academic, it is my belief that technology is considered to be the tool for enhancing students’ learning. However during the peak of the pandemic, most of us did not have much choice but to leverage the usage of online platforms in order to ensure that the learning process is not being negatively disrupted. The online courses conducted at the school, faculty and university levels had somehow encouraged me to venture into the use of Webex, Zoom, Google Meet and others as the main platform to conduct online classes and to stay connected with my students. I am glad to find that my students were also making the all the effort to familiarise themselves with online learning.

Despite the challenges, classes were successfully conducted, both using the synchronous and asynchronous methods. Throughout the online learning, I was abled to carry out the planned activities that had already been outlined in the CI. At the same time these activities had facilitated students to complete their assignments. Prior to that, I re-designed the instructions for the class assignments as to accommodate the multi-phases of Movement Control Order during which students could download the updated version of the assignment instructions. For instance, I re-designed the instructions particularly related to the way that students had to present their group assignments. Instead of face-to-face class presentations, I clearly mentioned in the instructions by asking students to prepare a 30-minute power point presentation based on their collective understandings towards the assigned topic and the sub-topics given to them earlier. Their slides need to have narrations i.e. audio recordings of their explanations of the points in the slides. Each group then had to prepare the concept mapping based on their group’s assigned topics, and exchanged it with the other groups. This was done via shared Google Forms that all students could access, and also linked to their e-learning portal. The Think-Pair-Share or Jigsaw activities were done asynchronously, and I found that through such activities students were abled to familiarise themselves with the theories and concepts of cognitive psychology. These were evident when they successfully submitted all their assignments via the shared Google Drive.

In a way, I believe that through such learning activities, I could nurture my students in having the sense of accountability towards their own process of seeking knowledge, and that through the time of crisis, they were also able to contribute in the process as to assist their colleagues in attaining the understandings of the fundamentals of the courses that they attended. To read my strategy of assisting students to attain the learning objectives through online learning visit https://people.utm.my/narina/updating-e-learning-portals-due-to-the-phases-of-covid-19-mco/

*Taken from personal TES DCP for Year 2020