Beyond the Shutter: Perception Teaching Quality in Learning Basic Photography in Sarawak

Abstract

Teaching quality is part of how students experience skills-based, studio disciplines such as photography, where learning depends on both instructional guidance and physical resourcing (Rabadán, 2015). Refers to the capacity to use, evaluate, and create content through the quality of teaching, and has become as important to photographic courses as camera technique (Ginns, Prosser, Barrie, 2007). This paper presents the perception of teaching quality readiness among local students in Sarawak by learning in photography courses in Malaysia. By using local institutional Course Evaluation Feedback (CEF) data from two related photography-relevant courses (n = 385) at a public institution. In the absence of a purpose-built perception teaching quality instrument, this study repurposes course appraisal data as a measure across four dimensions of teaching and learning methodology. Overall, this will cover 4 factors that are course perception, instructor professionalism, teaching and learning activities, and infrastructure, which are conceptually mapped onto the technical, cognitive, and social-emotional model of digital literacy (Ng, 2012). The findings show consistently “Excellent” ratings across both photography-related courses (93.50% and 98.46% overall), with the strongest performance recorded in instructor professionalism and teaching methodology, but a comparatively weaker infrastructure dimension. This gap is of practical significance in a discipline where equipment and studio access are directly tied to the development of digital skills, especially those related to the digital era. The paper situates this gap within Sarawak's range of rural-urban digital divide and argues that while teaching quality is not a barrier to digital literacy development in this context. It concludes that local institutions can use routinely collected feedback data as an early, low-cost signal of resourcing gaps as part of the evaluation and to improve further. It recommends that future studies validate these findings against a purpose-built teaching quality instrument for studio-based discipline before translating them into curriculum or investment decisions.