Skillful Lecturers: Arabic Teaching Experiences during COVID 19 Pandemic

The shift of the learning system from offline to online is a challenge for higher education lecturers. It demands creativity and innovation in designing the learning system, teaching strategies, methods, and evaluations to measure the students’ abilities and understanding. Those who are accustomed to teaching face-to-face might find it hard to switch to online. They need to learn to operate the platform. This study describes lecturers’ experiences in teaching online during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is a qualitative descriptive study with a phenomenological approach. The data are obtained from interviews with lecturers at the Center for Arabic Language Development at UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang. This study shows that the challenges in teaching Arabic online raise the lecturers’ creativity and innovation through various technology-based teaching activities. They even use several online applications in delivering the materials, such as Zoom, Google Meet, Google Classroom, WhatsApp, and Email. Technology-based teaching is a new transformation in education, especially in teaching Arabic.