Twelve Weeks of Online Learning and Teaching: Limitations and Best Practices from the Students’ Point of View

At the end of January 2020, as celebrations welcoming the Year of the Rat wound down, the wider academic community in Hong Kong was greeted with an announcement from its leaders that classes would be conducted online for the rest of the semester in response to the rapid spread of the COVID19 virus locally and worldwide. Thus began this journey into the (what was for many) unfamiliar world of online learning and teaching for students and teachers in Hong Kong at all levels. This study collects and presents evidence for the limitations and best practices in online learning and teaching from five business courses in the second semester of Academic Year 2019-20. Over a period of 12 weeks, from the first week of February to the last week of May 2020, these courses were conducted in 100% synchronous online mode using the Zoom video conferencing software and supplemented with synchronous and asynchronous online learning activities on platforms such as Moodle, Google Docs, and Kahoot!. Qualitative and quantitative student-centric data from course feedback questionnaires distributed at the end of the period, mid-course student surveys, and course assessment results reveal that students generally had a positive attitude towards this newly adopted learning mode and were appreciative of efforts taken by their teacher to provide opportunities for additional interaction. However, the data also shows that in an online learning environment, some students have developed higher expectations for attention and feedback from their teacher. In one course which had a significant experiential learning component, some students expressed disappointment at the limited number of opportunities for and challenges of learning experientially in online mode, despite giving the course and teaching methodologies used in the course generally favorable ratings. The study culminates with recommendations that seek to address student concerns and build on learning from the previous semester, primarily in preparation for the continued use of online teaching techniques to some degree in succeeding semesters.