Online Education in Rural Sri Lanka: Experiences and Challenges Faced by the Advance Level Students and Teachers during Covid-19 Pandemic

According to UNESCO, more than 1.2 billion students worldwide have stopped having face-to-face classes because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the closure of schools, online education was started as an alternative. Research conducted worldwide reveals that the sudden replacement of traditional teaching/learning methods with online mode created chaos in the education field. This research was conducted to explore the experience of the teachers and the students in rural Sri Lanka to identify unique issues they faced in adopting this new mode of education. Data were collected using a questionnaire from randomly selected 40 students from purposively selected two schools. In-depth interviews were held to gather information from five teachers. The quantitative data were analysed using Microsoft Excel, and the qualitative data were analysed using the constant comparative method. The findings reveal that the teachers and students could not successfully cover the syllabus through online classes due to the inability to cover practical sessions and technical errors such as poor signal coverage; both the students and teachers prefer physical education to online mode. Lack of technological knowledge, economic difficulties, and poor signal strength were the main challenges students and teachers faced while engaging in online education.