Impact of Online Education in the Second Year of Pandemic: Stress and Challenges Faced by Adolescents

The impact of the pandemic has been tremendous on all people, more so for students as studies have shown that they have experienced intense stress during the Covid-19 pandemic.  School closures, lack of socialisation, uncertainty, fear of contracting the infection are all contributing factors. The aim of the current study was to determine the students’ stress levels as a result of online education during the second year of pandemic as well as the impact that online education has had on them. This study adopted a mixed method approach wherein The Educational Stress Scale for Adolescents by Sun et al. (2011) was used to determine the educational stress levels of students and two open ended questions were formulated to understand the impact of online learning. Data was collected from students aged 16-18 years studying in classes 10th -12th from private as well as government schools in urban population from different cities. Descriptive analysis of the quantitative data was done to calculate the frequency and percentage of stress levels of the participants, which revealed that majority of the adolescents were moderately stressed. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the qualitative data and the themes identified were impact on learning, consequences on physical health, mental health issues, technological difficulties, environmental distractions, loss of social interaction and positive experiences of online classes.