Enhancing Synchronous Online Teaching Through Student-Centered Learning Approach

During the Covid-19 pandemic, students were forced to learn new knowledge using online platforms. Lecture sessions were replaced by video recordings of lecture. Students were poured with plenty of lecture videos to watch before attempting tutorial questions. Most of them only managed to replicate the procedures of solving questions without going through much thinking effort. Tutorials were conducted via video conferencing tools and students were not engaging as actively as they would when they were in typical classroom environment. Therefore, it has become even more important for us to empower the students with the ability to express their problems in science subject using accurate terms. This work proposed a student-centered learning approach suitable to be conducted synchrounously using Microsoft Teams. A week before the session commenced, students within a class were divided into smaller purposed-discussion-groups (breakout groups) with individual roles assigned to them. In each breakout groups, one of the students were assigned as chairperson and the rest of them were either a solution provider or a solution checker. Students need to complete the discussion of tutorial questions assigned to them critically. Solution provider is responsible in providing their solution while solution checker would verify the solutions provided by their peers. Share screen feature will be used if possible. During the session, the role of instructor was to facilitate and monitor the discussion progress. Instructor could intervene the discussion when necessary.