Abstract:

Many schools around the world are looking for various approaches to continue the delivery of teaching and learning delivery despite the threat and challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Educational institutions considered the idea of mixing and matching the different teaching and learning approaches to address the learning needs and conditions of the students in this time of global health crisis. In the Philippines, the problem of uncontrolled surge of COVID-19 cases put face-to-face classes still on hold, thus, resulting for colleges and universities to engage in emergency remote education. This phenomenon paved the way for courses like National Service Training Program or NSTP, which is a community-based immersion course, to resort to asynchronous online learning delivery. Interestingly, there were three themes or types of learning engagements that were revealed in a study using a phenomenological research design to ten purposively selected NSTP 2 students. These themes are student-content, student-teacher, and student-student engagements. It was found out that the theme student-content engagement is highly present in an asynchronous online learning environment while the other two forms of engagement can be described as limited or lacking. This scenario suggests the need for policy makers and curriculum developers to rethink and revisit the course design and delivery of NSTP 2 to address the challenges experienced by the students in this type of online learning approach.

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