Online Teaching During the Covid Pandemic: Attitude of Teachers Towards e-Learning in Bhutanese Classroom

ABSTRACT

With the development of modern technologies, teaching and learning through e-learning has gained much attention across the world in recent years. However, never in the history of humanity have we ever embraced an intensive use of e-learning across the globe until the outbreak of COVID-19. Like in the rest of the countries, the pandemic (COVID-19) has enforced Bhutan to close all the educational institutions and embrace e-learning widely. Subsequently, to foresee the adoption of e-learning beyond pandemic lockdown;this survey research study was carried out to investigate teachers' attitude towards e-learning and, their preference over classroom teaching and online teaching in Bhutanese primary and high schools. The study involved 127 teachers from 18 schools (3 high schools and 15 primary schools) under Wangdue district. The samples were selected by implementing simple random sampling technique. Questionnaire and open-ended questions were used in data collection. SPSS and Grounded theory coding system were used to analyze the data. The analysis of quantitative data revealed that more than 50% of the teachers preferred e-learning having shown favorable attitude towards it. It was uncovered that not only did usefulness and ease of use of e-learning technology pose significant contribution on teachers' positive attitude towards e-learning but teachers' exposure to computer also incurred a significant positive impact on it. Conversely, reluctance to adopt e-learning could be accredited to lack of ICT facilities and online teaching skill, improper ICT training, notion of e-learning shall not be better in improving the quality of their instructional delivery and environmental factors. While result from qualitative data revealed that teachers preferred classroom teaching over online teaching based on the motives like;classroom teaching being more authentic, comfortable and affordable. To better understand and embrace e-learning system in school positively, it is recommended that teachers must be facilitated with training on e-learning technology. Moreover, aspects that shall boost teachers' favorable attitude towards e-learning must be reinforced. The findings from this study can be handy for the curriculum developers, school administrators and teachers while taking decision on adoption of e-learning.