Online teaching and learning for Malaysia Polytechnic hearing impaired students: a case study / Dina Abdul Khalik and Farahdiba Md. Said

Using technology in teaching language to hearing-impaired students is essential as it allows the students to have a clearer picture of the delivered knowledge. During the threatening COVID-19 pandemic semester, not only learning through technology had become a compulsory teaching aspect but it had also required the teaching to be done online. Face-to-face teaching-and-learning session was strongly not encouraged so as to adhere to the Standard of Procedure set by the government. This was a small-scale study. Questionnaires were distributed to fourteen lecturers, from five different Malaysia polytechnics, who were responsible in teaching either English or Malay language to the hearing-impaired students. Each of these five polytechnics offers different special certificate programs for the hearing impaired. The study had four objectives – investigating on the readiness of the lecturers to teach the targeted students fully on line, finding out the lecturers’ preferred online platform and application tools, looking into the online teaching approach adopted and learning the students’ reactions towards online learning. Alsadoon and Turkestan (2020) pointed out that teaching students with disabilities are not without challenges but, having it to be done online, it simply magnifies the challenges. Still, the study showed that majority of the lecturers employed both synchoronous and asynchoronous approaches in teaching the hearing-impaired students online.