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© Proceedings of the Ruhuna Quality Assurance Sessions 2021 (RUQAS 2021)
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21 September 2021

“C” or better was compared for the Level-I, II and III. For this comparison, the average percentage of
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total pass grades (C or better) and total percentage average of fail grades (C , D, D and E) for each
level of study was estimated, and it was statistically compared by employing χ-square test at the 0.05

significant level. Statistical analysis was performed in IBM SPSS (25 version) while graphical
illustrations were done in MS Excel.

Results

Responses of Students

Out of the 297 student population of the faculty, there were 263 responses, which comprised level-I,
level-II, level-III and level-IV (89%, 81%, 89% and 95% respectively). According to their responses,

the majority (64 %) of them are willing to participate in online lectures in the morning hours from 8.00
– 12.00 noon. This choice was basically due to fewer disturbances at their residence in the morning

hours, the freshness of the day and the bad weather conditions in the afternoon.

When considering student preference on the duration of an online lecture, 30 % of students prefer both

one hour and two hours lectures followed by one hour and thirty minutes, and more than two hours
respectively. Students need a break of at least 10 min in between two online lectures due to several

reasons. Among those, dry eyes and headache were prominent among students due to continuing
exposure to digital screens and our findings totally agree with Singh et al. (2021). Majority of the

students in the Sri Lankan higher education system use either laptops or smartphones for their online

lectures (Hayashi et al., 2020) where the similar pattern was observed in the present study. According to
the responses of students, continuing online lectures results in heating up of their devices, and

consequently technical defects. Similar to present study, Vershitskaya et al. (2020) emphasized the poor
service strategies and insufficient technical support as some of the key issues in e-learning.

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There were significant differences (χ = 96.67, df =16, p < 0.05) in responses for their preference on
mode of assessments. According to student’s choices, the most preferred mode of assessment was

multiple choice questions (MCQs) (28.4 %), while they also preferred short answer questions (25.4%).
However, group presentations fell into either disagree (31 %) or strongly disagree categories (28.6%).

These responses revealed that the most preferred mode of assessment of the student is MCQs. As the
online assessments are conducted without physical presence of students and instructors at the same

place, suitability of online assessments are decided by the existing e-learning infrastructure and overall

cost of the process (Muzaffar et al., 2021).

Even though the interaction between student and teacher is important to continue the e-learning
process, the majority of the students (59 %) are not willing to have visual interactions with the lecturer.

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