The Asia Pacific Scholar, Vol. 8 No. 1 / January 2023 47 Copyright © 2023 TAPS. All rights reserved. SHORT COMMUNICATIONS Submitted: 22 February 2022 Accepted: 3 August 2022 Published online: 3 January, TAPS 2023, 8(1), 47-50 https://doi.org/10.29060/TAPS.2023-8-1/SC2764 Perceptions of clinical year medical students on online learning environments during the COVID-19 pandemic Kye Mon Min Swe 1 & Amit Bhardwaj 2 1 Department of Population Medicine, University Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia; 2 Department of Orthopaedics, Sengkang General Hospital, Singapore Abstract Introduction: During the era of COVID-19 pandemic, online learning has become more prevalent as it was the most available option for higher education training which has been a challenging experience for the students and the lecturers especially in the medical and health sciences training. The study was conducted to determine the perceptions of clinical year medical students on online learning environments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted to clinical year medical students at University Tunku Abdul Rahman. The validated Online Learning Environment Survey (OLES) was used as a tool to conduct the study. Results: Total 84 clinical year students participated in the study. Among four domains of OLES questionnaire, the domain; “Support of online learning” had the highest mean perception scores, 4.15 (0.55), followed by “Usability of online learning tools” 3.89 (0.82), and “Quality of Learning; 3.80 (0.68) and the domain “Enjoyment” was the lowest mean perception scores 3.48 (1.08). Most of the students (52.4%) rated the overall satisfaction of online teaching experience s “Very good” while (13.1) % rated “Excellent”. Conclusion: In conclusion, the perceptions of clinical year medical students on online learning environments during the COVID- 19 pandemic were satisfactory although there were challenging online learning experiences during the pandemic. It was recommended to include qualitative method in future studies to provide more useful in-depth information regarding online learning environment. Keywords: Online Learning Environment, Perceptions, Medical Students, Malaysia, COVID-19 I. INTRODUCTION Online learning is defined as learning via web-based technology and students interact with their peers and educators through web-based communication tools (Bonk & Reynolds, 1997). The usability of the web- based learning system is important as are its applications such as interactive video, forums, chat rooms, email, and document sharing systems (Klein et al., 2006). Online learning is regarded nowadays as a new way of interaction in the educational process and online learning facilities offer various opportunities to get new knowledge and develop students’ skills through engagement and interaction in new learning environments. (Samoylenko et al., 2022) Due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, all the higher education training has converted to online teaching and assessments including medical programs. To fulfil the student physical learning time requirement, the academic year of MBBS clinical year programmes (Year 3 to Year 5) has been divided into Phase 1; purely online teaching as medical students were not allowed to be posted to hospitals followed by Phase 2; face to face physical clinical training at the hospital. Phase 1 teaching for clinical years include, online task-based learning, online lectures and online case-based discussion, online clinical