STEP 5

INTERVIEW WITH EXPERTS

We did a meeting and discuss how to conduct our interview. Our interview topic is about the Challenges of teachers in the new normal during the Covid-19 pandemic. Moreover, we had decided to discuss the topic deeper so we had to interview the teacher to discuss our topic specifically.

    For our topic which is ‘Challenges of teachers in the new normal during the Covid-19 pandemic,’ we invited and interviewed a teacher from Sekolah Kebangsaan Saujana Utama named Mrs. Zakiah Binti Ishak. She is 51 years old. She has been a teacher for 26 years which is from 1996 until now. She has a degree in education and economics from Universiti Sains Malaysia(USM).

    Based on the result, from our interview with the teachers. She felt very surprised because this type of learning is very new for her in 26 years of experience in teaching and also including all the teachers. Moreover, she is not very confident about this despite just wondering about the challenges that she needed to face but as a teacher, she said that the problem needed to be overcome because she is a teacher. so she set up a new technique for teaching for the students even though she needed to do a lot of tasks.

    Besides, as a mathematics teacher in school. She also does the tuition at her home for the student that needed to learn from her. However, she is common with technology such as using laptop or LCD and also youtube. For example, she has mentioned that she has used a stylus pen to show the way how to count or to solve the problem because mathematics needs a neat step to solving the problem. On top of that, she also mentions that at her school. She always does related tasks online for example, google classroom which has been used for two to three years before but like google meet, Microsoft teams, and google form in new for her as a teacher. We can simplify that the teachers have been exposed to several apps or software before the covid-19 appears. So, this will be an advantage to the teachers when they needed to do the online teaching for example at home.

    Next, in the other perspective for the students. She agrees that many of the students do not focus on the lecture especially with the early students for example 7 to 12 years old. She overcome it with planning which is she recorded the video lecture to the students. So, the students would watch the video repeatedly. She also mentions that teachers need to know about the student's problem. So, she has a choice for the students whether to contact them via WhatsApp or telegram to make sure every student participates and involve in the lecture online or offline and provides the video to the students who are not understanding in the lecture before. Otherwise, they can watch it many times until they understand the topic.

    Then, about the material online for the students to do the revision. She has separated them into two-part which are pros and cons. For the pros, some students like to do the revision with the video provided or quiz but for the cons, it will be a big obstacle to some students who has a problem internet connection to do the revision especially students live in the village. So, the teachers provide another alternative to help the students with go to the student's house to pass them the material or task.

    Besides, there are several factors that make online more effective to the students, for example, the teachers can use applications to attract the students such as Powtoon, quizzes games to try to trigger the students to ask a question and answer.

    Moreover, most of the teachers have a bad experience in e-learning because of the student's behavior for example by her experience, just half of her students attend her class because when they are at home, they cannot guide their children to attend the class and another problem is she doesn't know whether the students focus or not when in the online class because she cannot watch the students face to face.

    Furthermore, she hopes that government should make sure that all the students have access to the online class by providing a good internet connection and also could sponsor the smartphone to the B40 students who do not afford to have that device. Others than that, the government also need to give motivation to the teachers by giving them counseling session each one of them

Last but not least, activities in online learning such as quizzes will improve the knowledge of the students because the technique that has been used is different from the normal learning in the school. However, it also depends on the students whether focus or not in the class.

DISCUSSION ABOUT INTERVIEW SESSION

We do a discussion about the interview session via Google Meet. We discuss the questions, who the expert we want to interview, when, where, who will conduct, and so on.We just screenshot our meeting because we cannot record our discussion by using Google Meet.