A Study of Students’ Engagement on the Zoom-based Synchronous Online Teaching

The outbreak of the COVID-19 created a chaos of global health crisis and campus health. To avoid class suspended, the Wollongong College Hong Kong (UOWCHK) has shifted most classes to a Zoom-based synchronous online learning environment. It includes one of my taught modules named ‘Introduction to Programming’. However, there is a lot of problems specific to online learning having been discussed in diverse studies. It includes that learning comes to be ‘passive’, ‘isolated’ and ‘unengaged’. Along with these problems, a study was organized concerning whether students can mentally engage with the Zoom created new learning environment stably across all the learning topics of this module. This study used a rating scale and anchoring survey method to collect quantized qualitative data on students’ feelings with five bipolar mental specifications, ‘Boring–Stimulating’; ‘Did Not Learn Much-Learned Much’; ‘Not Engaged in Learning Process-Engaged in Learning Process’; ‘Not Much Work Done-Much Work Done’, and ‘Could not Experience Good Learning- Experienced Good Learning’. Students were asked to rank against these mental specifications in 1-7 bipolar points upon completion the teaching weeks of week-2, week-5, week-9, and week-12. The responses on this study were analysed with the one-way repeated measure ANVOA and mean analysis descriptive methods. The outcome of this research is inspiring. It shows that students could stable engage to all major learning topics with a positive engagement. This result significantly provide evidences that students in this module were not restricted by using the Zoom to learn, and also the use of synchronous online teaching could be a supplementary learning approach and provide a flexible approach for instructional design.