Learning barriers
The responses of the participants in terms of learning barriers were
clustered into the use of Bahasa Indonesia in communicating with their
instructors and fellow classmates, the internet connectivity and the
pandemic issues. For Joan, she found the Indonesian accent confusing but
still she managed to get along well with her instructors and classmates.
The same goes with Elsa and Ann who were impatient of the slow internet
connectivity. In addition, pandemic issues such as travel restrictions,
no face to face interaction and internet expenses were barriers to
achieving the goals of the online program. During pandemic, smart phones
and internet data are very much in need especially for online learning
yet, connectivity and quality of mobile devices used are undoubtedly,
barriers to learning. This finding is similar to Muthuprasad’s [21]
findings that students preferred to use smart phone for online learning
but coming from a developing country, technical constraints like
suitability of devices and bandwidth availability always pose a serious
challenge.
“It’s great so far communicating between my instructor but for some
reasons during break-out sessions I find it a bit hard sometimes to
communicate with other students because of language barriers, there are
some who are able to speak full well in English while there are some who
only knows the basic but nevertheless, I didn’t let these barriers have
our way from getting the best learning possibilities we could have from
the exchange of conversation.”-P14
“I feel upset sometimes because the internet is not stable in our
place.” – P5
“The slow internet connectivity is really a challenge. Sometimes I got
left out in class just because my internet is buffering.”-P6