Ayesha F. Nehvi and Azim Javed
Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, countries worldwide went under complete shutdown
and implemented policies to shut down higher education institutions. As a consequence,
college-going students experienced many challenges, especially with regard to transition
and adaptation to online learning. The purpose of this paper is to understand the impact
of online education, because of the covid pandemic, on students’ wellbeing in the
Indian context. In this mixed-methods study, college-going students (N=146) from India
reported their perceived level of happiness and life satisfaction during online classes
and their attitude towards online classes. A detailed descriptive analysis was adopted to
understand the differences between the happiness and life satisfaction of respondents
who preferred online classes to offline. Through the SPSS application, the Mann Whitney
U Test was used to check for significant differences while comparing means of the groups
who either answered ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the open-ended questionnaire. For this open-ended
questionnaire, the authors used the standard significance level p-value of 0.05 or less for
statistical analysis. The main themes that emerged from the study: pointed towards little
to no difference in the happiness and life satisfaction of respondents in most aspects,
hinted that existing mental health problems were exacerbated, and highlighted that the
experience with online classes during COVID-19 greatly impacted the respondent’s
capacity to exert independence. Nonetheless, the overall perception of the respondents
towards online classes ranged from mixed to mostly negative.