Turning from Face-to-Face classes to virtual classes: Challenges, opportunities, and how high school students deal with it

The aim of this study was to investigate how students face virtual classrooms due to the Corona crisis and identify the challenges and opportunities for students in the first secondary school of Sari in the academic year 2020-2021.

The research method is phenomenology that has used a qualitative approach. The research field was all female and female students of the first secondary school and non-governmental schools in Sari city, which were selected by purposive sampling method of 16 students (8 girls and 8 boys) from 7 schools. The tool used in the research is a semi-structured interview that each interview lasted between two and three hours; Furthermore, MAXQDA10 software was used to analyze the data.

The findings showed that virtual education, as the only way to continue the process of school education in the quarantine of the Corona crisis, has posed challenges and opportunities for students. Strategies such as peer review and agreement between the researcher and the participant were used to validate the data.

Challenges have been examined separately in three environments of Shad, WhatsApp, and the TV school. Challenges of a Shad application include problems with the initial installation of the application, inability to run on all mobile operating systems, and low speed in uploading and downloading files. Also in the TV school, the lack of coordination of subjects, differences in teaching methods, one-sided teaching, and time interference of training have been raised as challenges. In WhatsApp, as the most widely used virtual learning space, challenges in six dimensions of individual issues, parents, teachers, teaching methods, evaluation methods, and ethical issues were analyzed. Opportunities also included not having classes on time, saving time and money on commuting, finding the need to learn technologies and using new methods by teachers, the possibility of the school principal controlling the class, education, comfort, and well-being of more students.