Meulídeo Banze

Nelson Zavale

Paragraph Essay (Online lessons during the Covid-19 pandemic have been considered to
have had adverse effects on both teachers’ and students’ performance)

Licenciatura em Ensino de Inglês

Universidade Save
Maxixe
2021
Essay plan

Topic

Online lessons during the Covid-19 pandemic have been considered to have had adverse effects
on both teachers’ and students’ performance

1. Introduction

2. Development

2.1. How does online lessons during the Covid-19 pandemic affects teachers’ and students’
performance?

a) Technology Issues

b) Sense of Isolation

c) Increasing of laziness and interest

d) weak academic development

3. Conclusion

Online lessons during the Covid-19 pandemic have been considered to have had adverse
effects on both teachers’ and students’ performance

The Covid-19 pandemic forced the interruption of the presential lessons which involve direct
interaction between the teacher and the students. However, the interruption did not cause the
standstill of the studies, that’s why, was adopted the usage of online lessons to continue the
Teaching and Learning Process. Nevertheless, this distance learning brought tremendous
consequences by changing teachers and students’ behavior in the teaching learning process.
These online classes made an automatic decrease to the academic development in the teaching
and learning process. Students were forced to study distantly what affected and decreased their
academic performance.
At the beginning students and teachers were struggling while accessing these online platforms.
Due to many factors like financial constraints, and students are not able to access the internet,
and are devoid of electronic gadgets and laptop, phone or computer or even radio and TV.
However, those students who have facilities to attend to online classes face barriers in terms of
unavailability of physical space, which is equally applicable to teachers who are supposed to
conduct online classes from their home.

For many students and teachers, one of the biggest challenges of online learning is the struggle
with focusing on the screen for long periods of time. During the online lesson the students are
forced to be for a long period of time in a certain screen device to attend the lessons. So, with
online learning, there is also a greater chance for students to be easily distracted by social media
or other sites, in this way affecting the quality of concentration and focus. Therefore, it is
imperative for the teachers to keep their online classes crisp, engaging, and interactive to help
students stay focused on the lesson.

Students can learn a lot from being in the company of their peers. However, in an online class,
there are minimal physical interactions between students and teachers. This often results in a
sense of isolation for the students. In this situation, it is imperative that the school allow for
other forms of communication between the students, peers, and teachers. This can include
online messages, emails and video conferencing that will allow for face-to-face interaction and
reduce the sense of isolation.

Online learning requires teachers to have a basic understanding of using digital forms of
learning. However, this is not the case always. Very often, teachers have a very basic
understanding of technology. Sometimes, they don’t even have the necessary resources and
tools to conducts online classes. And this impact the learning and teaching quality, resulting on
laziness and weak academic development. In this way, to combat this, it is important for
schools to invest in training teachers with the latest technology updates so that they can conduct
their online classes seamlessly.

Many parents are concerned about the health hazards of having their sons and daughters spend
so many hours staring at a screen. This increase in screen time is one of the biggest concerns
and disadvantages of online learning. Sometimes students also develop bad posture and other
physical problems due to staying hunched in front of a screen. Additionally, this fact causes as
well, the mental problems in the students and teachers affecting their performance in their
curriculum activities. So, a good solution to this would be to give the students plenty of breaks
from the screen to refresh their mind and their body.