Online Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic: How Do We Do It?

Due to the spread of COVID-19, the government of the Republic of Indonesia has instructed the people to stay at home and conduct self-quarantining until the condition improves.  BINUS University is striving to take preventive efforts with the aim of protecting the health of all students, lecturers, employees, and all related parties. All of the lecture activities are conducted using online methods.

During the learning from home period, it is normal for students to be bored, stressed, or worried about the current situation or to be confused with the new learning methods. Therefore, lecturers look for ways to make learning activities interesting and to make the students comfortable with their study. All departments in BINUS INTERNATIONAL, such as Business Information Systems, Business Management & Marketing, Communications, Computer Science, Finance, and International Business are utilizing these methods.

Lecturers use video conferencing where they can study, conduct discussions, and stay in contact with the students. Every lecture starts with material and explanations from the lecturers and continues with discussion or presentations from the students. At the end of the sessions, the lecturers give a quiz to test their knowledge in an exciting way. For example, they hold quizzes using Mentimeter, which allows the students to compete with each other. The ones who answer quickly will get extra scores and there will be ranking at the end of the quiz.

Another way to keep the lecture activities fun is quizzes using the Space Race quiz which a fun way for students to answer a quiz while allowing them to work together as a team. These quiz methods will improve the students’ understanding and teamwork among students.

The students who are in the Internship Program are also working from home while doing their projects online, but still maintaining discipline as if they were working in the office and striving for excellence in the job. As for students who are writing their thesis, they still have supervisory guidance from their lecturers. The thesis seminar is conducted online through video conference and all of the research and projects will be done at home.

Blessing, a student on the Finance program, said that the online lecture activities are a chance for students to study harder than before. At the beginning of the online classes, he needed time to adjust and adapt to the online methods. Then he figured out that he needed to study harder than he did before and minimize the things that distracted him from online study. “We can’t blame anyone for online classes because COVID-19 is a disaster for everyone. We just need to make sure to use this opportunity to study harder,” he said.