Impact of Online Education on Students’ Wellbeing

Abstract

During the Covid-19 pandemic, most educational activities moved from classroom-based to online for extended periods of time, raising questions about the possible negative impact on the students’ (and teachers’) health and wellbeing, as well as on the educational outcomes. The study described in this paper started with the assumption that the time spent online is a measure of the changes induced by the pandemic in the structure of students’ daily life activities, and tried to find correlations between this variable and their subjective and psychological wellbeing. Participants were 98 students with ages between 14 and 21 from Romania. We found that, contrary to the common belief, there is no correlation between the increased amounts of time spent online and lower levels of the students’ wellbeing. This is most likely due to the fact that most adolescents already used to spend a lot of time online even before the lockdown. We conclude with a defense of online education, which – in our opinion - should not be held responsible for the decline of the students’ wellbeing during the Covid-19 lockdown.