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.
Graduate employability is a critical issue in Higher Education. Employers are expecting not only the subject knowledge from the students to compete with the current industry demands, but also additional skills to face corporate battles and challenges. The aim of this research is to identify the skills demanded by the employers and to incorporate them in the learning outcomes of higher education. This research aims to review and analyses all the papers published from 2010 until now regarding the evaluation of graduate students from employers’ perspectives. This subject has been rarely touched in literature and needs more focus regarding to its importance for both education institutions and employers. Papers were collected from different databases and carefully analyzed by the authors. Different classification methods were done. The results were analyzed. The results indicate that there is a gap between the learning outcome and the employability skills.
Covid-19 related lockdowns forced students of higher education to receive education entirely online as a replacement for physical attendance in classrooms. This new situation caused students to discover the advantages and disadvantages of e-Learning and influenced their satisfaction and intention to use it. Consequently, this study revisits the intention to use and satisfaction-related theories based on pre-covid conditions. This revisit was necessary because the evidence suggests that students' new situation has changed some determinants related to their satisfaction and intention to use. This situation warranted the simultaneous consideration of many dimensions when measuring user satisfaction and intention to use during the lockdown. This cross-sectional study developed an integrated model to measure students' satisfaction and its impact on e-Learning intention to use. Structural equation modelling was used to conduct the empirical analysis. Nine hundred respondents from Malaysia and Saudi Arabia participated in this study. Students from Malaysia and Saudi Arabia showed marginal differences in their perceptions of e-Learning. The findings showed changes in students' perceptions towards satisfaction and intention to use e-Learning, which might be due to using e-Learning exclusively.
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