Exploring Needs of Academic Writing Course for LMS in the New Normal

Abstract

Along with the university policy for remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic and the new normal era, learning management system (LMS) become one of various alternative system to handle online learning. However, its application needs to be well-prepared and well-designed. This present study was a need analysis as an initial stage in developing Moodle LMS-based EFL Materials for academic writing course at university. The participants were 67 students from academic writing course. A questionnaire was major instrument to find out the learning needs and context, accompanied by documentation to seek the activities and materials on the existing course. The results show the needs of academic writing course and the proposed EFL materials through Moodle LMS. Student-participants revealed that the course should be able to improve students’ writing skill in developing academic texts through essay development and research article. Moreover, process writing approach and genre-based approach become the most preferable approach for teaching with plenty of sample texts in PDF format. The students-participants also thought that teacher-feedback, individual project-based assessment, and real-time online session or synchronous mode are the best for online learning through LMS. The proposed Moodle LMS-based EFL materials apparently adopts the steps of process genre-based approach and a framework of Bloom’s digital taxonomy.

Needs Analysis of Project-Based Learning Model in Writing Paragraphs from EFL Students’ Perspectives

“…Grammar and tenses are also needed by the students. This result is in agreement with the findings (Ampa & Quraisy, 2018;Fitriani et al, 2020;Ilham et al, 2020;Sabarun, 2019;Sakkir et al, 2021;Sundari & Leonard, 2020;Sutaryo et al, 2023). From the students' responses above, it can be seen that the highest needs from the student's point of view are types of exercise in paragraph writing related to unity and coherence (54%), types of exercise in paragraph writing which is related to analyzing a topic sentence, supporting sentences and concluding sentence (49%), types of exercises in paragraph writing related to arranging paragraph from jumble sentence (49%), distribution of exercise are individually and in groups.…”

Effective or Impractical? Discussing Students' Perceptions toward Learning Management Systems in English Language Learning

“…Teaching English has experienced LMS's involvement in developing language skills and language components. The involvement of LMS in the teaching of productive skills, speaking and writing (Seau & Azman, 2021;Sundari & Leonard, 2021;Truong, 2021) and the receptive skills, listening and reading, has improved learners' mastery (Sulistyanto & Imada, 2020), as well as the mastery on language components (Ivanjko & Grubješi, 2019;Novitasari et al, 2018;Safitri & Lestari, 2021). It is also perceived that the involvement of LMS provides learners with autonomy (Zainuddin et al, 2019) where learners study at their own pace and time availability (Manurung, 2005;Rahman, 2014), the teachers become ICT literate (Omar & Yaacob, 2020), and the institutions provide support to facilitate the language teaching (Lalima & Lata Dangwal, 2017).…”

The effect of project-based learning on English writing skill for EFL learners

“…In a new learning environment, the learning process and management system also need to be transformed, including in the EFL materials development (Delimasari et al, 2023;Sundari & Leonard, 2021). The language learning process should provide the students with many activities and opportunities to practice their skills while maintaining a continuous learning process.…”