The infectious disease of the COVID-19 pandemic affected all aspects of human life including business, research, education, health, economy, sport, transportation, worship, social interactions, politics, governance and entertainment (Orfan and Elmyar, 2020). In fact, the world has been stressful for everyone and the outbreak of the virus caused problems in education. Afghanistan as a post-conflict country is not an exception in Asia (Rahim and Chandran, 2021). To avoid the spread of COVID-19, the Afghan government took certain measures. They closed all the educational institutions, locked down the cities and banned people from traveling from a city to another city (Orfan and Elmyar, 2020). Later, the Ministry of Higher Education asked the educational institutions to conduct their classes online. It is when the resources and technological facilities are limited compared to other countries (Jogezai et al., 2021; Noori et al., 2020), which impacts students’ learning.
It is understandable that the spread of COVID-19 caused school closures and lockdown around the world. Meng et al. (2020) argued that almost all countries experienced changes in education. Since the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, the universities have transformed teaching and learning and the lecturers have been conducting online classes (Rahim and Chandran, 2021). The Ministry of Higher Education introduced an online learning system called “Higher Education Learning Management System” (HELMS). Moreover, the instructors have also used other platforms like, Zoom, Google Classroom, WhatsApp, and WebEx to deliver their lectures (Danish, 2020)
Studies show that the significance of online education is not as good as the in-person learning (Thai et al., 2020; Widodo et al., 2020; Berga et al., 2021). Abbasi et al. (2020) stated that the majority of students did not prefer online teaching compared to face-to-face learning in Pakistan. In their study, they found that 86% of respondents felt that online teaching has little significance on students’ learning in higher education. This study also revealed that the experience of online learning was not engaging enough because limitations have caused lack of practical aspects in teaching. Mukhtar et al. (2020), Snoussi (2019), Almaiah et al. (2020), Almanthari et al. (2020), Alqahtani and Rajkhan (2020) and Dhawan (2020) argued that insufficient resources, problems in maintaining academic integrity, issues in policy, lack of students’ self-discipline, technical issues and lack of confidence were the main challenges in implementing online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Day et al. (2021) reported that the students were stressed during the COVID-19 pandemic which negatively impacted their learning. They also stated that the universities and test centers concealed exams which suspended students’ entrance to college and universities. Many instructors have reduced the amount of instruction and practice or the duration of the online lecture was less than the scheduled one and the learning was not significantly enough for the students. Goldsteinal et al. (2020), Hamilton et al. (2020) and Wyse et al. (2020) indicated that many students did not have access to the materials shared by their instructors. In many cases, students even did not log into online learning system which shows a low level of student engagement in online learning. They also pointed out that the COVID-19 pandemic devastatingly impacted students’ learning.
By: Analyn D. Lugtu|Teacher III |Balanga Elementary School|Balanga City, Bataan
