Students’ Perceptions of Online Learning During the Pandemic

Students’ Perceptions of Online Learning During the Pandemic
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Students’ Perceptions of Online Learning During the Pandemic
Introduction
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented changes in the global community. All sectors of the economy were therefore impacted by the continued ban on public gatherings. The education sector was not spared, with a majority of schools closed down to prevent the further spread of the virus. With schools closed, there was a need to ensure continuity of education due to the need to reduce the interruption time, especially with an unknown date to the end of the pandemic. Thus, online learning provided an option for schools to continue their programs through the internet, with facilitators having lessons with their students at home. While online learning has provided a solution to continue teaching over long distances, it has also raised several issues regarding gaps in its effectiveness.
Impact of online learning on students
The major benefit of online learning was the ease at which students could access their lessons over the internet to continue with their lessons. By limiting their movements from home to interact on the school compounds, learners are protected from the scourge of the coronavirus, thus reducing community spread. Therefore, online learning provides a safe alternative for learners by ensuring that they can resume their studies with little interruptions. Furthermore, learners can also learn over long distances, meaning that they do not require to travel to designated centers to access the lessons.
However, Gillett-Swan (2017) highlighted the problems of online learning to isolated students. The quick announcement of the pandemic once it affected a significant portion of the globe threw things in the education sector into disarray. Consequently, with students sent home indefinitely, problems of continuity compounded the problem with the risk of the entire academic year going to waste with no solution to the pandemic in sight. With mandatory online learning being the solution, all schools had to transfer their programs online within a short period. However, in this case, the approach was to assume that all students could quickly adapt and benefit from this system. While online learning is not a new phenomenon in higher education, its large-scale use presented challenges to learners who were initially used to face-to-face interactions with their facilitators (Sekulich, 2020). Furthermore, learners learn at different paces, hence online learning does not provide versatile options as it was previously.
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