Analysis of the students’ perceived stress on online learning during the transition of COVID-19 pandemic to endemic: The perceived stress scale method

When the COVID-19 virus outbreak, the government immediately implemented a lockdown system to break the chain of the virus transmission. Even the education sector was not spared from its impact. The government then set online learning as an alternative, but this reaped the pros and cons. In higher education, online learning is considered less effective and can lead to increased student stress. However, after almost 2 years, the government succeeded in tackling pandemic and the cases of COVID-19 began to subside, therefore the government began to re-enact offline learning. The transition from online learning to offline learning has once again reaped pros and cons. Factors such as students’ perceptions of online learning and the stress they experience affect the choice of learning methods that are preferred by students. This study aims to analyze the effect of online learning on stress levels experienced by students of the Faculty of Medicine at Swadaya Gunung Jati University. This research is an observational type with a cross-sectional design. This study included 560 students and was conducted using a Perceived-Stress Scale questionnaire and the data were analyzed using the Spearman correlation test to see the relationship between 2 variables. Results of the 560 students studied, 1.5% experienced mild stress, 80.3% experienced moderate stress, and 18.2% experienced severe stress. The Spearman rank obtained is 0.026, indicating that the strength of the correlation between the 2 variables is very weak. It proves that there is no significant relationship between online learning and student stress levels.