Universities around the world have been directly and indirectly affected due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Within the span of less than one month, the traditional face-to-face learning has been replaced by online learning to ensure education continuity. This paper sets out to examine online learning readiness among university students who have been thrown in at the deep end. It aims to investigate if demographic factors make any difference in their readiness to learn, online learning experiences and intention to continue using online learning. It also examines their preferred methods of online learning and challenges they face. Data collected from 399 students in two different online learning courses in Malaysia showed that respondents are generally ready for online learning. However, females are found to be more ready than male, degree students are more ready than diploma students while female students and degree students are more satisfied with online learning and have better learning experiences compared to male and diploma students. More than half of the respondents indicated that if given a choice, they do not want to continue with online learning in the future. Most respondents preferred online learning via pre-recorded lectures uploaded to Google Classroom and YouTube. While the biggest challenge for degree students is internet connectivity, for diploma students, it is the difficulty in understanding the content of the subject. Moving forward, government, telecommunication companies and universities should invest in developing internet infrastructure across the country as online learning will be the new norm in the foreseeable future. University also needs to provide further training to enhance academics’ online teaching skills to ensure lessons are delivered more effectively

Linguistic and cultural communication skills are essential for nurses as they are at the fore front in public and private hospitals, physicians' offices, clinics and other outpatient care facilities. Indeed nurses provide the human touch for patients seeking medical advice at a particular medical centre before consulting a physician. Recently, the Ministry of Higher Education has released statistics on unemployment among nurses -about 8000 nursing graduates have not secured jobs. As such, a study was carried out to examine the reason for such a serious situation in Malaysia when other parts of the world are in dire need of nurses. A quantitative methodology was adopted to determine the reason for unemployment among nurses as well as to find ways to relocate these unemployed nurses to parts of the world where their service is needed. This study draws several conclusions about the unemployed nurses and ways to enhance their communication and English language skills to make them more 'marketable' as well as be able to execute their duties effectively at workplace. The results indicate a need for a special English language course-design for theses trained nurses.

This study investigated the role of learners’ culture in their choice of learning preference. It took a closer look at how students cultural norms influenced collaborative writing performance. A survey approach was employed via a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to tringulate the findings. Two Institutions were involved in this study, Institutin A comprised of Malay learners while Chinese learners represented Instituion B. The findings suggest that students’ learning is embedded in rich culture and attributes and as they interacted in their groups, they demonstrated positive values such as unity, tolerance, obedience and respectfulness. These values were more obvious among learners in Institution A. These leaners revealed that since young they have been instilled to practice and appreciate their culture and customs and this was seen in the way they interacted in the classroom. The students were sharing ideas politely and practising their cultural values even in the academic context. A few self-centred learners also changed their social behaviour from a selfish attitude to a more sharing and accommodating behaviour by the end of the study. At Institution B, some learners demonstrated positive values like unity and sharing attitude but they did not practice them throughout their group work. They were more individualistic and preferred individual work. It was apparent that the students’ cultural virtues transcended from the social to the academic setting and have become a part of their life. This paper concludes that cooperative group work is effective because of the students’ embedded values and culture, and that culture is a dominant controlling factor that impacts one’s way of learning and communicating in a formal ESL academic setting

This paper marks the beginning of a project aimed at trialing a Western learning model in a Malaysian context where it is yet to be tested by previous research. This paper is the first of a series of research papers written to show the process in which a framework used in a bigger study was designed. It gives a sound theoretical background to support the building of Project Zero (PZ) framework and provides a comprehensive argument to realise the needs identified by the government of Malaysia, by explaining why Visible Thinking (VT) might be a useful tool for developing a more constructivist pedagogy. Most of PZ research was conducted in school classrooms in a Western setting. This study prides itself in taking PZ research to a whole new level, that is to a higher learning institution in a Malaysian classroom setting where undergraduate students were studied, this marks the novelty of this research. The PZ framework for observation and analysis was developed by carefully studying the Visible Thinking Project to determine the thinking routines used, this in turn formed the core of the framework. Data from interviews with 3 groups of 59 undergraduate students and their 3 teachers were then analysed qualitatively. It was found that this Western learning model has positive implications for students’ learning.

Research in education has been conducted over the decades to find the best practices in learning. Although there is no one size that fits all, gamification is one element in learning that has been proven to carve a niche for itself in many aspects in education. This has led to the creation and development of various types of games to suit various needs in education. Funlinguistics is a linguistics game for students taking Language and Linguistics course. It covers topics like morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It adopts structural gamification approach that uses Microsoft PowerPoint as the main platform with Visual Basic Applications (VBA). The game consists of questions set at different difficulty levels based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. The game can be used to in a conventional classroom as well as during synchronous Open Distance Learning (ODL) environment. It is also well received by students who indicated their liking for it through an online survey.