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