Readiness to Implement Digital Learning

Abstract

WHO announced the Covid-19 as Global Pandemic in early 2020? This condition immediately urged universities to migrate their instructional process to fully online learning as a result of the suggestion of physical distancing. This situation indeed results in the shock of the culture of learning and teaching. Following its shock, of course, questions arise related to the readiness of higher education in implementing fully online learning. This study aims to measure the readiness of lecturers and students of the Faculty of Economics, Universitas Negeri Medan (Unimed), in implementing digital learning. This study investigates the readiness from the normative belief perspectives. Normative belief is one of the critical antecedents of behavioral intention, as explained in The Theory of Planned Behavior [1]. The respondents of this study were lecturers and students at the Faculty of Economics, Unimed. This study uses simple random sampling to select the sample. With the snowball technique, this study collected 226 responses. 85 respondents were a lecturer, and 141 was a student. Data collection was carried out with an electronic questionnaire designed with 5-Likert scales. This study examines the differences of responses between lecturers and students as well as between men and women to avoid response bias. The results of this study indicate that lecturers and students have firm beliefs regarding their readiness to migrate learning activities to the online platform. Likewise, the findings of this study also indicate nervousness in the migration. The results of this study provide challenges for learning researchers and Education technology to produce recommendations for learning models that are suitable for implementing quality learning on digital platforms. The same challenge is faced with universities and regulators to develop best practices in teaching practices and regulations that urge innovation in teaching practices.