Google classroom: insights from Malaysian higher education students’ and instructors’ experiences

Abstract

Google Classroom (GC) has provided affordances for blended learning in higher education. Given this, most institutions, including Malaysian higher educational institutions, are adopting this learning management system (LMS) technology for supporting out of classroom pedagogical. Even though quantitative evidence exists to confirm the usefulness of GC usage, there is the need to also have qualitative narratives from students and instructors to obtain details on actual experiences. In view of this, the study attempted to fill this gap by way of a qualitative approach with data collected from seventeen students and three instructors from a Malaysian higher education institution. The study revealed usefulness and easiness were the main factors influencing the use of GC from both perspectives. However, concerns raised by students were based on privacy issues, peer interaction, and interface design, whereas instructors, while supported some of these concerns, added challenges in access to GC learning analytics and cloud storage. Recommendations from this study may offer some implications for the adaptation of GC in higher education.