Abstract—As a developing nation, Malaysia is looking
forward to transforming its direction towards the Industrial
Revolution 5.0. Aligned with the transformation process that is
mainly driven by the rapid modern industrial transformation,
Malaysian education system is faced with a variety of challenges
especially in equipping young adults with innovative, digitally
literate, and high critical thinking skills to make them
future-ready. Additionally, the growing digital world economy
has resulted in the loss and transformation of jobs which
necessitates the transformation of Malaysian education for
future employability. Moreover, the ongoing global COVID-19
pandemic has accelerated the digitalization of the education
sector. Hence, this study aims to explore, analyze, and evaluate
first-year Bachelor in Accountancy students’ perspectives with
regard to their online learning experiences in digitalized
classrooms by looking at six dimensions: 1) Self-Directed
Learning, 2) Learner Readiness toward Online Learning, 3)
Learner Control, 4) Online Communication, 5)
Computer/Internet Self-Efficacy, and 6) Motivation for
Learning. Using a qualitative research design, online interviews
via Google Meet involving 43 first-year students were
conducted. The recorded interviews were then transcribed and
analyzed using ATLAS.ti 8. The results of the study suggest that
online learning has its advantages and disadvantages based on
the respondents’ perspectives and experiences. A majority of
the respondents reported that they enjoyed online learning and
were well prepared for it while some of them perceived online
learning as a complicated approach due to some factors. It can
be concluded that these students were ready for online learning.
Index Terms—Digitalized classrooms, educational
transformations, first year-students, online learning.
The authors are with the Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM), Malaysia.
*Correspondence: Adriana416@uitm.edu.my
Cite: Adriana Shamsudin*, Siti Nurulhuda Mamat, Nur Farahah Mohd Pauzi, and Mohd Syazwan Karim, "Adapting to Changing Expectations: Accounting Students in the Digital Learning Environment," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 166-175, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).