ABSTRACT

It is good to look at how digital technologies can be used to ensure that university teaching and learning processes go ahead in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for populations in developing countries with limited internet access. In the middle of March, Most of the cities in Indonesia, including Purwokerto, have implemented Work From Home (WFH) system. It is used to reduce the spread of the virus. Since then, a majority of lecturers and students spend a greater part of their time in a day on internet access. The internet traffic data from the biggest provider in Indonesia shows an increase of 16% in the use of online learning applications such as Ruang Guru and Google Classroom. While the use of social media during WFH tends to be stable. Things are different in the use of instant messaging like WhatsApp which has increased by 40%. Increased traffic also occurred on the use of online games by 34% and the use of video conferencing and streaming increased by 17%. Using instant messaging for academic purposes is less common before the pandemic, but we would argue that it is potential for university to exploit especially in this era.  WhatsApp (WA) has become popular with 1.5 billion users in 180 countries, which makes it the most used chat application. Although the lecturers do not know this traffic, they look this as a big opportunity and try to enhance it by exploiting the features of WhatsApp. Based on the explanation above, the writers want to describe the use and role of WhatsApp in teaching and learning process during the pandemic of COVID-19 in Universitas Jenderal Soedirman Purwokerto. The methods used are qualitative method which focuses on field and library Study. Field study is used to get the factual data in the university through survey. We gather information by google forms and spread it trough out the faculties. The survey consists of closed and open questionnaire. The result of the study shows the features of WA which are commonly used are chat or exchange text, audio, video and easy shares. Those features allow direct access to lots of online resources in real time. The role of WhatsApp is as a media to support teaching and learning process and also to maintain communication in the classroom (between lecturer and students). Moreover, the lecturers think that WhatsApp is cost-effective and easy to use, giving it competitive advantage over the other social network platforms. We conclude that for some lecturers consider that WhatsApp is giving more advantages for students and lecturer.