Open Distance Learning (ODL): Observe the Students’ Impression of the Introduction Electric Circuit Course during Pandemic in Malaysia

Abstract

A new cohort of Electric Circuits course with the Engineering Technology Accreditation Council (ETAC) is facing a sudden teaching and learning challenge due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, most lecturers are embracing the new norm and moving from the physical method to open distance learning (ODL) as universities resume the semester after a long break. This paper highlights students' impression of ODL practices among electrical engineering students for this course at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia during the COVID-19 outbreak. Their impressions will be observed and analyzed so that the lecturers can develop another effective online and software-related approach as the goal of this study. Students in the second semester of electrical engineering who took the course on electric circuit were given a survey with two (2) stages, at the beginning and end of the semester using Google Form to gather first and last impressions and provide more effective data for investigation, including their understanding of all nine topics within the course. Baed on the finding results, majority of students initially opposed to the ODL concept, especially since this course is the most demanding course in electrical engineering majors and a prerequisite for many subjects. The main difficulties in the ODL sessions are internet connection and understanding of technical issues. To overcome internet limitations throughout the ODL session, the asynchronized (recording) teaching and learning methods can be employed. Conducting hands-on work with electronic ODL toolkits enhanced students' technical and practical understanding. The significant improvement was also evident at the end of the semester compared to the beginning of the semester in understanding all nine topics as the lecturers are always willing and available to be contacted and discussed for further explanation. Nevertheless, positive and gratifying results correlating the students' overall satisfaction with the ODL teaching and learning activities and the professionalism of the lecturers at the end of the semester. For the future researches. we plan to use the results of these analyses to link students' final outcomes results on the efficacy of ODL approaches. It's crucial that this is recorded so that researchers can examine the benefits and drawbacks of online education.