A Shift from Physical to Virtual Class Environment Due to COVID Epidemic: Secondary School Students’ Experiences

During COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, other countries as well as Govt. of Pakistan adopted online learning in order to keep continuing teaching-learning process without any gape. As a result, world saw a paradigm shift from physical classrooms to virtual/online class environment. The basic purpose of this study was to explore secondary school students’ personal experiences of virtual/online learning. For this, total 409 students from different government and private secondary schools participated in this study. A self-developed questionnaire was used to collect the required data. It was found that maximum students possesses their own smart phones and were taking online classes through these phones; male students and students from secondary private schools were positively more inclined towards online learning. Online learning was interesting technique for them which enabled them to learn new IT skills and saves them from corona virus disease. Lack of training and/or no experience of online; poor internet connections; understanding mathematics/physics problems online and expensive for some of the sampled students’ parents to arrange laptop/desktop/smart phones for them for their online classes were the major problems in attending online classes