The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the adoption of home-based learning due to periodic school closures in Singapore. The media and academia carried diverse views on the effectiveness of this alternative mode of education. To reveal teachers and students' perceptions on home-based learning, this study draws data from teachers' interviews and students' focus group discussions of an ongoing large-scale baseline study on Singapore mother-tongue education. Via corpus-based method and word-cloud visualisation, this study found that the interviewed teachers attempted to mimic physical lessons online and were highly concerned with the challenges in monitoring students' tasks online. Though students enjoyed the freedom of doing their learning tasks at their own pace, they were concerned with the lack of teachers' support and the social-emotional support from peers. With the feedback and reflections from teachers and students, it was observed that despite the availability of technology and online infrastructures, mother-tongue teachers need readiness for transiting between physical teaching and online instructions, whereas students need readiness for self-directed learning. From students' feedback, it was also noted that parents need readiness for educational technology and support for their children. To better prepare teachers, students and parents for future home-based learning, it is recommended that the nationwide education platform shall provide more resources for mother-tongue language lessons, and parents will have to assume a greater role to monitor students' learning on behalf of the teachers for better effect in home-based learning.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the adoption of home-based learning due to periodic school closures in Singapore. The media and academia carried diverse views on the effectiveness of this alternative mode of education. To reveal teachers and students' perceptions on home-based learning, this study draws data from teachers' interviews and students' focus group discussions of an ongoing large-scale baseline study on Singapore mother-tongue education. Via corpus-based method and word-cloud visualisation, this study found that the interviewed teachers attempted to mimic physical lessons online and were highly concerned with the challenges in monitoring students' tasks online. Though students enjoyed the freedom of doing their learning tasks at their own pace, they were concerned with the lack of teachers' support and the social-emotional support from peers. With the feedback and reflections from teachers and students, it was observed that despite the availability of technology and online infrastructures, mother-tongue teachers need readiness for transiting between physical teaching and online instructions, whereas students need readiness for self-directed learning. From students' feedback, it was also noted that parents need readiness for educational technology and support for their children. To better prepare teachers, students and parents for future home-based learning, it is recommended that the nationwide education platform shall provide more resources for mother-tongue language lessons, and parents will have to assume a greater role to monitor students' learning on behalf of the teachers for better effect in home-based learning.
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