Faculty

The data for this study were collected from 263 undergraduate students through responses to a survey. The participants were students from different programmes and levels of study across the faculties in a local university. They ranged from first to final year undergraduates from both the sciences (e.g., Faculty of Science, School of Digital Sciences, Institute of Health Sciences) and non-sciences faculties (e.g., Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, School of Business & Economics, Academy of Brunei Studies). All participants had been involved in online classes almost exclusively since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and so had ample experience of online learning. Following the survey, five-student focus group interviews (SFG) were conducted with the purpose of probing further the questionnaire responses. All interviewees were from the survey respondents and participation was voluntary.
This study adopted a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods for data collection and analysis. A semi-structured questionnaire was distributed to the participants (see Appendix 1). Items in the survey were drawn up by the researchers based on the issue of student silence raised in the research literature and their observations from their own online classes. Each survey consisted of three sections. The first section required participant details relevant to the study. The second section contained a number of Likert-scale type items on student verbal participation in online classes to gauge student perceptions. Included in this section was a sample scenario to help direct participants to complete the items in the questionnaire. The last section posed an open-ended question. The questionnaire is bilingual in that each item has a Malay translation to ensure full understanding amongst Malay non-English speaking students. A pilot study was carried out to address issues of clarity of items. The link to the questionnaire was distributed to students’ emails across the faculties. The responses from students were exported to Microsoft Excel for coding and quantitative analysis. A PivotTable was used to summarise and present the sets of data. The items in the questionnaire were further divided into categories according to the research questions posed. Categories comprising two or more items were then subjected to the Cronbach Alpha reliability test for internal consistency. The results were then presented in the form of tables showing the survey items and percentages for frequency of occurrences of responses under each item.
Following the survey, and based on simple random sampling, five-student focus group interviews (SFG) were conducted. These interviews were deemed to be necessary to provide further insights into the significant responses gathered from the questionnaire data. Altogether twenty-three students took part in the focus group interviews with five students in three SFGs and four students in two SFGs. A focus group interview offers opportunities for interactive discussion of differing, complex personal experiences and beliefs amongst respondents (Kitzinger, 1994 (link); Morgan, 1998 ). As students may have different perceptions and attitudes towards student silence in the online class, it was felt that a focus group interview would be an appropriate method to gather their perceptions. Although an interview guide was drawn up with possible topics for discussion (see Appendix 2), these group discussions were largely unstructured interviews much like informal conversations where the researchers as moderators introduced a topic which was then expanded upon or further explored based on the interviewee(s) responses. The interviews lasted between fifteen and thirty minutes.
For the purpose of analysis, the interviews were audiotaped with the consent of the participants. Each interview was then transcribed and the transcript was subjected to a thematic analysis according to Braun & Clarke’s (2006 (link)) framework. A thematic analysis gives primacy to experience (Holloway & Todres, 2003 (link); McLeod, 2001 ) which is particularly relevant in this study. The SFGs promote a deeper sharing of student verbal participation in the online class by students themselves, which in turn provides valuable insights into the phenomenon of student silence in question. The goal was to identify themes and patterns in the interview data that could help address the research questions. Furthermore, this study employed a bottom-up or inductive analysis, one where the themes emerge from the data itself. Because of the more subjective nature of this method of analysis, the transcripts were reviewed and interpreted by all four of the researchers separately to obtain reliable and valid findings.