The COVID-19 pandemic has struck the world and forced countries to go into lockdown including education sector. Students have been staying in hostels or houses, unable to go to university campuses. This situation has left university administrators no choice, but to have an online learning channel. Malaysian universities in particular have gone through many challenges to bring their online learning system up and ready to resume education process. However, students have found themselves caught in this situation (pure online learning) with no plan or readiness. Literature reviews showed that students encountered some challenges that could not be easily resolved. This study explored the challenges encountered by students of a government-linked university. This university is one of the largest in Malaysia with over 10 campuses across the country. This study collected 284 valid answers. The findings show that respondents lacked full readiness in this situation physically, environmentally, and psychologically with some differences in perspectives according to their gender, age, and residing state. Respondents were concerned about the implications of lockdown on their performance. The findings of this study indicate that a sudden switch to a pure online alternative creates considerable challenges to students who have no plans to be physically apart from classes. The findings also indicate that the current blended learning process which uses online learning as a support mechanism for face-to-face learning has faced a considerable challenge to replace it, particularly with unprepared students. INDEX TERMS COVID-19 epidemic, country lockdown, online learning, Malaysia This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.

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Most of web users today are university students. They become more familiar with Information Security (IS) because it is a taught course in the university curriculum. However, there are many students whose level of awareness on this subject is still not enough considering the occurrence of security risks and their frequent usage of the internet. Many studies have been conducted to assess students and to raise their level of IS awareness. This study concerns about students' knowledge and their behaviour or action towards IS. This study investigates whether students' knowledge influence positively over their cultural habits of ignoring things in IS environment. This study inspects students' knowledge about risks that face them daily particularly when they deal with their emails, social network accounts,

Purpose – This study explored students’ perspective of using emotion-aware Vertual Learning Environment (VLE) in Malaysia’s higher education institutions. The purpose is to investigate the relationships among dimensions of Technology Readiness Index (TRI), attitude, intention to use VLE, and lecturer interaction. The outcomes concerned the emotions involved in the educational process of Malaysia’s higher education institutions. Methodology – Quantitative data were collected via an online survey from 260 students. An empirical analysis was then conducted using structural equation modelling (Smart PLS) in two phases: (1) examining the direct effect of students’ attitude on VLE adoption intention and (2) examining the indirect effect of constructs using lecturer interaction as a mediator. Findings – The findings revealed a significant mediating role of lecturer interaction on the relationship between attitude and intention to use VLE across the student cohort. Inhibitors, such as insecurity and discomfort, were less significant in affecting students’ attitude towards emotion-aware VLE. The results indicate that students are motivated to use VLE when lecturers understand their emotions and react accordingly. Significance – This is one of the studies pertaining to emotions in VLE and lecturer interaction in higher education institutions. The results facilitate an understanding of the pedagogical role of lecturer interaction as a practical learning motivation. It is of particular interest to curriculum and e-learning stakeholders looking to improve students’ interactions with the VLE systems. Apart from extending the current literature, this study has significant practical implications for education management in higher learning institutions. Keywords: Emotion-Aware VLE, Technology Readiness Index (TRI), Attitude, Intention to Use, Lecturer Interaction, online learning, Smart PLS, Higher Education.