Page 12 - Jurnal Kurikulum BPK 2018

Presently, WhatsApp is one of the most popular apps across all mobile platforms and handles
more than 10 billion messages per day (Church, & Oliveira, 2013). There is no charge for
messaging or calling over WhatsApp (WhatsApp Inc., 2018).
Literally every student studying at the Teachers’ Education Institute comes equipped with
a smartphone. That is because they come from all over Malaysia, many from as far as Sabah and
Sarawak. Hence connectivity with their loved ones and friends are of paramount importance. They
also need to connect with their lecturers, course-mates and other friends on the campus. This is
compounded by the fact that there are many subjects for their whole course and the subjects and
lecturers vary each semester.
The campus ground is also wide and lecturers and students may even be out of state for
some official reason or other. Lecturer’s connectivity with the students is important particularly
when unforeseen events occur. When such things happen, the WhatsApp messaging system
becomes a very important tool. Setting up a subject WhatsApp group for the group of students
taught for the semester becomes a useful innovation then and is therefore the change innovation
initiative for this study.

DATA COLLECTION METHOD

The data collection was done via participative observations, document analysis, and five
structured interviews. The site for the data collection was at the institute of teacher education
where the researcher is attached. There were participative observations as the researcher
implemented the WhatsApp group method for the teaching of the subject Language Description
to the TESL foundation students during the semester concerned (The researcher was teaching the
subject Language Description). A pilot initiative whereby lecturers used the WhatsApp group
method to connect with their students had already been implemented with other academic groups
for other subjects in the previous semester.
Data collection was done via analysis of the documents related to the change initiative.
The documents related to the change initiative mentioned include the WhatsApp messages from
the researcher’s and the respondents’ phones (where allowed), proformas (syllabi), which were
then renamed table threes of the academic subjects, namely Language Description, English for
Effective Communication and History besides other documents, were studied and analyzed. The
researcher was then the academic lecturer for both subjects, Language Description and English
for Effective Communication. These documents were collected and analysed. The subject History
was taught by a male lecturer from the Social Studies’ department. Hence some of the documents
were readily accessible whilst the History proforma had to be borrowed from the lecturers
concerned. Data from the interviews conducted were also recorded, transcribed and then
categorized according to their themes.
Five respondents were chosen for the interviews. These five respondents comprised the
Head of the Language Department, one English lecturer, a History lecturer and two students. The
two English lecturers (one of whom is the researcher and the other a male lecturer) were teaching
the two English subjects. The researcher used WhatsApp to communicate with her students in the
course of teaching the subject, Language Description that semester. The other interviews were
conducted with the male English lecturer teaching English for Effective Communication and a
History lecturer who was from the Social Studies Department. Before these lecturers were
selected, they were asked whether they used the WhatsApp messaging system to form a WhatsApp
group with their students during the semester. Therefore the sampling method used in this study

2