Abstract:

The world-wide COVID-19 pandemic situation has influenced the everyday work of schools in many countries. In Slovakia, all educational institutions were closed on March 16, 2020, which affected almost 1 million learners, including 440,000 secondary school students. Those schools, which wanted to provide their students with quality education in spite of the unfavourable conditions and uncertainty, had to make a decision regarding their functioning during school closure, whose duration could not be predicted. Attempting to find the most suitable form of remote learning meeting the needs of their students, from among several alternatives, a number of schools opted for streaming lessons live, which opened new opportunities for research on the appropriateness of online learning for secondary school students.

The authors of the study carried out a questionnaire survey with students, their parents, and teachers on their experiences and satisfaction with online education during pandemics. In the proposed paper, based on the obtained results, the authors discuss the issues of live-streaming in the context of secondary schools with special attention paid to its benefits, shortcomings, and challenges. The findings show a general satisfaction of all stakeholders with live-streaming during pandemics, but the respondents were not that enthusiastic about using it during non-crisis situations. Nevertheless, the findings indicate that the impact of pandemics on the work of secondary schools cannot be perceived as purely negative, as it has opened new opportunities for their future work.

Keywords:

Pandemics, live-streaming lessons, secondary schools, online learning.