COVID-19 AND ITS IMPACT ON ACADEMIC LIFE OF STUDENTS AT QUAID-I-AZAM UNIVERSITY ISLAMABAD

Abstract

Corona Virus which is called COVID-19 has broken out from the Wuhan city of China in November 2019 and within two months it spread across two hundred (200) countries, sent billions of people into lockdown, self-quarantine, and closure of all educational institutions and non-economic activities. Many countries across the world have shifted their face-to-face classes to the online system of instruction, where students attend lectures, submitting their assignments, and research work through online sources. The Educational Productivity theory was applied in the research which stated that students can overcome their educational or academic issues and convert them into opportunities through their efforts. The quantitative research method was chosen, and universe of the study was Quaid-i-Azam University. The simple random sampling techniques were adopted to acquire data from respondents directly and through online sources. The closed-ended structured questionnaires were used as data collection tools. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 22.0 was used to analyze the data in numeric forms. The findings of the where the majority of the respondents were agreed and strongly agreed that, students are attending online classes, where they are disturbed due to lack of fast internet, lack of proper communication with teachers and other class fellows, their study plan has been suffered, semester schedule is affected, facing problem in access of online materials, such as research papers, journals and reference books. Moreover, students have agreed that teachers are not evaluating students to work fairly and do not allow students to ask questions. Furthermore, students, who are doing final years research are also suffered due to lack of proper communication with the supervisor or the access to quality materials as well as respondents. Additionally, students were not concentrated on studies due to lockdown. The lockdown has also negatively affected the mental level of students, where they are not concentrating on the studies. Further, the results of inferential statistics also showed that the lockdown and COVID-19 have negatively impacted on the academic performance or the academic life of students at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad Pakistan. Furthermore, the University make policies which facilitate students learning process.