STUDENTS’ UNDERSTANDING LEVEL OF ONLINE TEACHING IN THE TECHNICAL AND VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING (TVET) SECTOR

Although online education is not a recently emerged concept, the popularity of the concept has been boosted with the pandemic COVID-19, where the students have to depend totally on online education and they have been framed in it forcefully irrespective of the fact whether online education suits all type of education, especially for the sectors where the practicality is given the priority such as in the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector. Therefore, there arises a need to investigate the understanding level of the students. The objectives of this research are to identify the students’ understanding level of online teaching and to evaluate the relationship between the understanding level of students and online teaching methods.  The population of the study was all the students in the TVET sector in Sri Lanka and the sample was 294 students from 6 university colleges. Structured questionnaires were distributed among the sample for data collection. Descriptive analysis and correlation analysis were employed in the data analysis. The results discovered that a majority of students understand the online theoretical lecture delivery but they lack infrastructure facilities to engage in the academic activities. There is a low level of understanding of practical lessons. Moreover, the results visualize a moderate positive relationship between the students’ understanding level and online teaching methods.  The researchers suggested that online teaching can be used for theory lectures in critical situations such as disasters but for the practical sessions, the student should physically be present to the field. Efficient strategies relevant to each type of professional qualification provided by the institutes should be implemented.