The “skip online learning” twitter campaign, launched by the anti-establishment “Bad Students” movement, to reject the online teaching being applied in most schools across Thailand during the COVID-19 pandemic, is trending on social media today (Monday).

The movement is urging students to skip online classes, from today until Friday, in protest against the online teaching method which, it claims, is ineffective and discouraging for many students who may not understand the lessons being taught and cannot ask their teachers for explanations.

It also claimed that many students are not ready for online learning, implemented about four months ago, due to the lack of learning tools, while several teachers themselves are not fully prepared as well.

Some students tweeted that they were given too many lessons and too much homework, including group homework, with which they cannot not cope, while others complained that they were forced to switch on cameras in their smart phones or laptops so teachers are sure they are not skipping classes.

One parent of a Grade 3 student told Thai PBS that he found some online lessons, which were in the form of video clips, boring, adding that, sometimes, when his boy did the homework as assigned by his teachers, he had to print them out like a book.

According to the Bad Students’ webpage, https://badstudent.co, 1,230 students from several schools in Bangkok reported they had skipped classes at about 11am, in response to the campaign, and the list is growing steadily.

Move Forward MP Wiroj Lakkhanaadisorn said in his Twitter post today that the first problem with online learning which needs to be fixed is to omit the secondary subjects and to concentrate on the main subjects, to reduce the workload on the students.

More than 891,000 tweets with the “no online classes” hashtags have been posted as of 3pm on Monday.