Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the global education landscape and has impacted universities around the world, including Malaysia. Online teaching and learning have been fully carried out in most of the countries to complement the traditional face-to-face learning activities. Students are required to stay at home, while tutorials and continuous assessments are conducted online. In this study, the internal factors that impact the students’ intention to participate in online learning were investigated, in addition to the significant difference between gender regarding their perception towards online learning. As per the extant literature, the internal factors are technology self-efficacy, self-directed learning, learning motivation, learner’s control, and online communication self-efficacy. Survey procedures were employed to gather the relevant data. The online questionnaires were disseminated and recorded from a total of 386 respondents comprising of students from various public universities in Malaysia. The data were then analysed using several statistical analyses, namely pilot test, descriptive statistics, multiple linear regression, and t-test. The results from the multiple linear regression indicated that self-directed learning, learning motivation, learner’s control, and online communication self-efficacy impacted the students’ intention to participate in online learning. However, technology self-efficacy has no significant impact on online learning. There was also no significant difference between gender in terms of their intention to participate in online learning. The findings of this study are anticipated to assist the universities in Malaysia in developing their policies on online teaching and learning while enhancing the students' motivation to participate in online learning.

Keywords:

COVID-19 pandemic, internal factors, online learning, university students.