Does Online Learning Meet the Expectation? A Case Study of Short Semester General English Class

The fact that today’s students are mostly equipped with high level of digital literacy encourages English teachers to use the Internet as one of the teaching learning media. Moreover,, the abundance of online materials for EFL students which are easily accessible makes the teachers’ job much easier. However, these advantages do not come alone without any drawbacks that challenge the teachers in implementing effective online teaching-learning activities for the class and get the most of it. This paper highlights the challenges that the teachers face in implementing online learning for general English class during the short semester program and reveals students’ perceptions on it as part of the reflection on the teaching-learning process. The unique characteristic of this program which is run only for one month requires the teacher creatively seeking effective activities for the class in order to meet the program requirement. The class shows that the students’ performance during the online learning is better compared to the offline class. The students become more active as well as enthusiastically involved in posting thread and giving feedback to their classmates’ thread. Although during the process the students show interest in joining the online discussion, the teacher still have difficulty in finding the strategy to measure the effectiveness of this mode of learning. The reflective writing written by the students identify some issues which mostly deal with their impressions in joining the online learning as well as their difficulties in performing during the teaching learning process. Some students even give suggestions for better improvement in the next application of online learning. Keywords: online learning, teacher’s reflection, students’ perception, students’ performance.