Case report

Evgeny O. Anokhin, Gleb Yu. Aleshin*, Alexey A. Tishkin, Vladimir V. Korolev,Alexander G. Sobol, Konstantin M. Evdokimov and Alexey A. Chepiga

Not great, not terrible: distance learning ofchemistry in Russian secondary schoolsduring COVID-19https://doi.org/10.1515/cti-2020-0016Received July 27, 2020; accepted April 21, 2021; published online May 4, 2021

Abstract: The COVID-19 outbreak has influenced virtually all aspects of our life, in particular, hundreds ofmillions of people around the world have been forced to study online. To observe the practical realization ofemergency remote teaching of chemistry during the first wave of COVID-19 in Russia we gave the survey to 217teachers and 355 students frommore than 50% regions of Russia about their experience during distance learningof chemistry. 17%of studentswere lacking chemistry lessonsat all.Wecompared thiswith the situation inLetovointernational boarding school in Moscow and found relative success in terms of lessons adaptation and overallsatisfaction compared to the Russia-wide survey. This might be because of the fine educational organizationeffort and implemented learning management system (LMS). There is a high probability of a second COVID-19wave or any other occasion that may lead to sudden change to distance learning. Teacher community shouldlearn from world-wide and country-wide experiences of the first COVID-19 wave to become prepared for futurechallenges. Those preparation measures may include implementing LMS and strategy development.

Keywords: COVID-19; emergency remote teaching; secondary schools.

Introduction

The pandemic of COVID-19 has a dramatic influence on almost every area of human activity (World HealthOrganization. Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Pandemic, 2020). Education is no exception: according to theUNESCO 188 countries around the world cancelled all lessons in schools, that affected up to 91.3% of allprimary and secondary school students (UNESCO. Schools closures caused by Coronavirus (Covid-19), 2020).Closing schools is one of the most common nonpharmaceutical interventions to the pandemic (Centers forDisease Control and Prevention. Nonpharmaceutical Interverntions (NPIs), 2020). In Russia schools are closedsince March 23 (Over 80% of schools in Russia closed or on vacation from March 23, 2020): for the first twoweeks of this period most of the schools had a vacation and after that distance learning period has started allover the country. The end of a school year in Russia is May 31st, thus Russian schools were on the emergency

*Corresponding author: Gleb Yu. Aleshin, Letovo School, Zimenkovskaya Street 3, Sosenskoye Settlement, Moscow, 108803,Russian Federation; and Lomonosov Moscow State University, Leninskie Gory, 1, Moscow, 119991, Russian Federation,E-mail: gleb.aleshin@gmail.com. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9725-2217Evgeny O. Anokhin, Alexey A. Tishkin, Vladimir V. Korolev, Alexander G. Sobol and Konstantin M. Evdokimov, Letovo School,Zimenkovskaya Street 3, Sosenskoye Settlement, Moscow, 108803, Russian Federation; and LomonosovMoscow State University,Leninskie Gory, 1, Moscow, 119991, Russian Federation. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3991-1843 (E.O. Anokhin). https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7122-5317 (A.A. Tishkin). https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8396-2162 (V.V. Korolev). https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7409-6031 (A.G. Sobol)Alexey A. Chepiga, Letovo School, Zimenkovskaya Street 3, Sosenskoye Settlement, Moscow, 108803, Russian Federation.https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0526-0931

Chemistry Teacher International 2021; 3(4): 349–357

Open Access. © 2021 Evgeny O. Anokhin et al., published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution 4.0 International License.

remote teaching for 8 weeks in the spring of 2020, and the virus forced Russia, like many other countries, tomake an experiment with themass transition of schools to online education. Sudden disruptions in learning isactually not rare and might be happening not only due epidemics (for example due to protests and socialdisruptions) as was previously noted (Potgieter, Pilcher, Tekane, Louw, & Fletcher, 2019).

During the pandemic situation teacher community and students faced emergency distance teaching, but notnormal online learning (Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust, & Bond, 2020). In this situation we have a few points.Undoubtedly, online learning is the most relevant trend of the last decades since Internet access became widelyavailable (Broadbent & Poon, 2015). Even intellectual competitions in chemistry can be conducted in onlineformat (Paiva, Parma, & Buffon, 2020). Interactive methods and information technologies are widely applied inchemistry teaching, including in-class education process (Bellou, Papachristos, & Mikropoulos, 2018; Prat-Resina, 2019; Sadykov & Čtrnáctová, 2019). From the other point of view, it requires certain technical equipment(i.e. computer or laptop) for every single student and teacher, and not every household in developing countriescan afford it. Mass transition to online can also lead to inequality in educationwith some students not having anylessons at all. For example, in Great Britain 71.1% of students in state schools and 27.8% of students in privateones had less than 1 lesson in a day during lockdown (Green, 2020; Weale, 2020). Finally, the most importantfeature of chemistry is the role of experiment in the education process (Kimel, Bradley, Durbach, Bell, &Mungarulire, 1998). That point can be crucial to the chemistry teaching process: a video of an experiment cannotfully replace onemade by students themselves (Ben-Zvi, Hofstein, Samuel, & Kempa, 1976a, 1976b; Zhilin, 2013),while home-made experiments have significant limitations due to both inaccessibility of most chemicals andsafety requirements (D’Ham, De Vries, Girault, & Marzin, 2004; Kennepohl, 2007).

High possibility of the COVID-19 s and the following waves (Leung, Wu, Liu, & Leung, 2020; Xu & Li,2020) makes it especially urgent to reflect on the experience gained during this period of distance learning.Some recent reports describe the experience of education during COVID-19 pandemic (Ahmed, Allaf, &Elghazaly, 2020; Basilaia & Kvavadze, 2020; Kogan, Klein, Hannon, & Nolte, 2020). There is no evidence thatRussian experience is unique, it is more likely that this is just an example of what consequences follow fromthe general premises. In this communication we discuss the realization of online learning of chemistry inRussian secondary schools. Also, we highlighted one of the practices in the organization of distance learningof chemistry in Russia on the example of Letovo School in Moscow. Thus, the aim of this paper is to note theemergency remote teaching problems, to study its practical realizations and analyze best practices andtreatments.

Methods

To determine the real situation at the end of the school year, three surveys were compiled using the Google Forms service. Thequestions of the survey can be found in the Supplementary Material.

Information about the surveys was distributed on the Internet among schoolchildren of grades 7–11 (age 13–18) and chemistryteachers participating in the Russian annual chemistry tournament (national version of International Chemistry Tournament(International Chemistry, 2020)); thus, data were collected using random sampling. This method contains systematic error (re-spondents without proper Internet access do not have an adequate representation), but in general it can be considered satisfactory.The last survey was conducted among Letovo international school students. Letovo school is a private school (with a grants forstudents that can’t pay for education), students in secondary schools have from 2 to 6 h of chemistry a week as in public Russianschools. The total coverage was about 1100 teachers and 13,000 students. According to the results, the following number ofresponses to the polls was collected: 355 respondents among students and 217 among teachers all over the country, and 78respondents from Letovo school students.

In Russia there are approximately 16.5 million schoolchildren (Dmitrakova et al., 2019); it can be roughly estimated that ingrades 7–11 (grades when chemistry is studied), there are about seven million of students. More than 200 students can beconsidered as a sufficient number of respondents. Letovo students’ poll appears to be representative as well, since only 350students have chemistry in their curricula. Normally they have from 2 to 6 lessons of chemistry a week in a frontal teachingformat. For both all-country surveys, the sample seems representative by the geographical principle (students from 46 differentRussian regions of total 85 regions and teachers from 54 ones: it is more than 50 and 60% of all regions respectively) andsufficient.

350 E.O. Anokhin et al.: Distance learning of chemistry in Russia during COVID-19

Results and discussion

Russian-wide survey results

Hereby we represent the results of all-country surveys of students and teachers.According to the survey (Figure 1a),more than 80%of both teachers and students thought that the number

of chemistry lessons had not increased. Particularly, more than а half of the respondents believed that thisamount had not changed at all. The results are not surprising, since addition of new lessons to the curriculumin the middle of the year seems highly unlikely.

At the same time, almost half of the students noticed (Figure 1b) the increase of the amount of homework inchemistry. On the other hand, two-thirds of teachers believed that the amount of homework had not increasedduring the period of distance learning.

It was interesting to compare students’ and teachers’ opinions about the adaptation of practical works fordistance learning (Figure 1c). They appeared to be virtually opposite: most students believed that the workshad not been adapted, while most teachers believed they had been. We attribute this to the difference in

Figure 1: Russian-wide surveysanswers.(a) Amount of chemistrylessons during distancelearning, (b) amount ofhomework during distancelearning, (c) whether chemistrypractice was adapted fordistance learning.

E.O. Anokhin et al.: Distance learning of chemistry in Russia during COVID-19 351

understanding of practical works adaptation. Teachers adapt practical work by the means of including videosto online lessonswhile students expect real experiments. Realization of real experiments ismuch harder; thus,its ratio is relatively low. Our results are in agreement with previous reports about comparison of teachers’ andstudents’ opinion about forced using filmed experiments instead of real practical works. In these reportsauthors showed that both of these approaches help reach some knowledge of discipline but conducting realexperiments appears to be necessary for students themselves (Ben-Zvi et al., 1976a, 1976b).

Although the global picture is mainly positive, one should be aware of the situation when distancelearning is reduced to homework and self-education. This is totally unacceptable and requires intervention inthe organization of the educational process and this may lead to overall failure of distance learning.

Our survey indicated that 17% of respondents had no distance chemistry lessons at all (Figure 2a) whichmight be extrapolated to 1.2 million of students (of seven million students studying chemistry in Russia).

The surveys showed high levels of involvement among the students who attended distance learning. 53%of respondents replied that they had actively participated in most lessons. Teacher survey confirmed that with40% of respondents marking more than half of the active students on lessons.

Fifty five percentage of students believed that their grades during distance learning did not change and35% of students noticed improvement (Figure 3a). It is surprising to see that 79% of teachers say that averagegrades of students have increased during distance learning, including 26% who say they have significantlyincreased. As possible explanationswe can suggest subjectivity of teachers’ perceptions about average grades,informal governmental recommendation for a more loyal assessment during distance learning, and influenceof students cheating during online assessment.

The overwhelming majority of both students and teachers told that online learning was “much worse” or“slightly worse” compared to full-time study (Figure 3b). The number of teachers who are satisfied with thequality of distance learning is at the level of statistical error (1 answer out of 217). This amount is bigger amongstudents, about 10–15%.

At the same time, the subjective opinion (Figure 3c) regarding distance learning (“whether you like it or not”)is higher than could be expected from the quality assessment. Almost half of the students told about onlineformat either neutrally or positively. Among teachers this format is rather negatively evaluated (more than 70%).Such a difference for various sides of the educational process may appear due to the attitude regarding theeducational process. For students it is quite usual desire towork less during classes. So, distance format seems toput less pressure on students.

Some students noticed more simple learning of the content using distance lessons records, others told,that reducing the amount of lessons allowed to prepare for competitive chemistry events.

Figure 2: Russian-wide surveys answers.(a) Involvement of students during chemistry online lessons, (b) involvement of study groups during chemistry online lessons.

352 E.O. Anokhin et al.: Distance learning of chemistry in Russia during COVID-19

According to the surveys more than 70% of teachers and students did not have any implemented LMSduring distance learning period (see Supplementary Material, Figure S1). Only 20% used Google Classroom intheir lessons.

Letovo school practice

As an element of comparison, we can consider the experience of switching to a distance format for teachingchemistry at Letovo international school in Moscow.

Letovo is a boarding school with students from all time zones of the Russian Federation (from GMT+2 atKaliningrad toGMT+12 at Kamchatka). The transition to quarantinemeasures beganduring the spring holidays(March, 15–March, 22), so the students had already left the boarding at the moment. The school extended thevacation time by oneweek in order to better prepare for the distance learning format. During this period Letovodeployed somenew educational tools aswell as adapted the learningmanagement system (LMS) implementedearlier.

During usual full-time classes LMS Canvas (Canvas, 2020) was routinely used: normally teachers uploadlesson materials, curriculum, hometasks, tests, instructions and other materials. Students also use it to do

Figure 3: Russian-wide surveysanswers.(a) Change of marks duringdistance learning, (b) quality ofdistance learning incomparison with full-timestudy, (c) satisfaction withdistance learning.

E.O. Anokhin et al.: Distance learning of chemistry in Russia during COVID-19 353

homework and reviewpastmaterial in everyday education process. Thus all students and teachers had alreadybeen familiar with this system before the beginning of distance learning. Normally it was used as an educa-tional resource that complemented classes in chemistry, all students could view educational materials andcontact the teacher remotely.

The school decided to use the Zoom platform for online lessons (Morgan, 2019). The IT department of theschool developed a system generating scheduled video conferences with restricted access. Thus, the problemof zoom bombing was solved and the problems associated with insufficient experience in using technologyboth among students and teachers were minimized. In addition, the school decided to reduce the duration oflessons: from 40 to 30 min in order to reduce the length of school day due to the presence of students fromdifferent time zones. In the case of classes that are held in pairs (two lessons in a row), the second lesson wasreserved for students to work independently to minimize computer use during the school day to meetgovernmental health regulations.

Due to the limitations of emergency remote teaching, the amount of practical work has been minimized.Partially practical exercises were replaced by showing video demonstrations, but several practical works wereredesigned taking into account the reagents that could be found at home. For example, practical works in theseventh grade on the topic “Evidences of the chemical reactions”, in the eighth grade on the topic “Ion-exchangereactions”, in the ninth grade on the topic “Theory of electrolytic dissociation”were adapted to be held at home(see the details of this practical works in Supplementary Material Section). In all of the above-mentioned works,the common requirement was using safe reagents. The reactions were carried out in highly diluted solutions. Inaddition, the teacher observed the students’ practical work through video conferencing at Zoom.

Noticeably, that the most active students in the class remained at their high level of academic perfor-mance, students of average activity worsened their performance, while the most inactive students improvedtheir results. However teachers observed that the differentiation and engagement of students during theseminars has worsened. Only the most motivated students participated in problem solving practice and skillstraining.

Teachers believed that work-life balance had shifted. The border between learning/teaching and personaltime virtually disappeared, students used the opportunity to contact the teacher at any time convenient forthem. On the contrary, the option of live class small talks between the student and the teacher has completelydisappeared: the maximum level of communication is achieved only during general video conferences.

In relatively large groups of students (more than 12 people), the amount of collaboration and teamworkhad significantly decreased: the practical implementation of such activities was extremely inconvenient,despite the presence of breakout rooms in Zoom. However, if students received individual tasks theirinvolvement in lessons had increased. Individual tasks could be combined with carrying out a collectiveproject, for example, filling in tables in teams with data in Google documents or similar services.

In extracurricular activities in chemistry work was carried out in small groups (usually less than sixstudents). Therein, the opposite dynamicswas observed: studentsworked even harder, uniting their efforts. Asa result, overall performance of these classes improved. Distance format not only did not become an obstacle inlearning for motivated students, but also provided an opportunity to develop their collaboration skills.Particularly active students interacted with each other while using online whiteboards (for example, a Zoomboard, Google Jamboard, Miro).

After the end of the school year, an anonymous survey was conducted among the students of Letovoschool, about 22% of students of grades 7–10 participated in this survey. Data are presented in Figure 4.

Despite the fact that Letovo school decided to reduce the duration of the lessons and transfer part of thelessons to an independent work format, most students (65%) believed that the number of lessons remained thesame and only 31% of respondents noticed a decrease (Figure 4a). This result indicated that the workload onstudents during the distance learning format had increased compared to full-time classes. Only 4% of re-spondents believed that the number of lessons had increased (compared to 18% in Russia).

According to Figure 4b only 19% of Letovo school students felt an increase in homework (in Russia 46% ofthe students gave this answer). Apparently Letovo distance learning avoided the situation when the educa-tional process mostly relied on self-education and homework.

354 E.O. Anokhin et al.: Distance learning of chemistry in Russia during COVID-19

Only 23% of students in Russia showed that practical work had been adapted to the distance learningformat. Letovo school survey indicated much better performance towards this problem: 59% of students(Figure 4c) believed that the practical classes were well implemented in the distance format. A similardependence was observed considering overall involvement in lessons during video conferencing: 67% ofstudents in Russia versus 85% of students (Figure 4d) in Letovo school actively participated in such lessons. InLetovo school 80% of students (Figure 4e) responded that their grades did not decrease during distancelearning (in Russia — 90%). The result is not surprising since the grading and assessment systems have notbeen changed.

Fifty four percentage of the Letovo students believed that the assimilation of distance chemistry learninghad slightly or significantly decreased compared to full-time lessons (Figure 4f). At the same time, in Russia65% of students gave similar answers. The general attitude of the students towards distance learning seems tobe similar: in Letovo school, 28% liked this format (Figure 4g), in Russia— 33%; 50%of Letovo students versus50% in Russia disliked the format.

Despite the overall high performance in Letovo in this particular case, distance learning yet remains aforced measure inferior to full-time education. This partly might be the case due to the benefits presented byschool in full-time education that cannot be countervailed by distance learning benefits. Those includeextracurricular activities, communication etc.

The main limitation of this study is survey sampling. Although the information about the survey wasbroadly distributed, the sampling was conducted mostly among the teachers working with students who areinterested in chemistry and among participants of chemistry competitions. It is natural to assume that ourresults might be positively shifted from true country-wide average. But as well teachers and students mayoverestimate the problems caused by distance learning because of their interest.

Conclusions

In this communication we analyzed major challenges deduced from Russia-wide surveys and compared themto the experience of Letovo School distance learning. Distance chemical education during the first wave ofCOVID-19 pandemic in Russia went neither great nor terrible. Our survey indicates that every sixth studentstudying in grades 7–11 had virtually no distance chemistry lessons at all. Overall involvement of students

Figure 4: Letovo school students survey answers (all data are presented in comparison of distance learningwith full-time study).(a) Amount of lessons, (b) amount of homework, (c), adaptation of practical lessons in chemistry, (d) participation in lessons,(e) impact on grades, (f) assimilation of material, (g) students’ subjective attitude towards changing the lessons: Liked or not.

E.O. Anokhin et al.: Distance learning of chemistry in Russia during COVID-19 355

during the online lessons was high (50%), but most of themwere disappointed with the quality of the distanceeducation and adaptation or even lack of practical works. Nevertheless, the subjective opinion on distancelearning was either neutral or positive in almost half of the students’ answers.

Despite some unique challenges of Letovo boarding school our experience may act as an example ofrelative success of distance learning compared to the rest of Russia. We suggest that an efficient educationorganization seems to be the crucial brick in thewall of distance learning. LMS introduced before the COVID-19lockdown simplified the transition to distance learning. There is a high probability of the second COVID-19wave or any other occasion that may lead to another sudden transition to distance learning. Schools need totake advantage of the time between the waves and get prepared: produce a distance learning transitionstrategy taking into account the challenges faced by schools in the first COVID wave, implement LMS or othernecessary online educational tools.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material contains brief descriptions of practical works suitable for distance learning,Russian-wide surveys answers regarding LMS usage, full list of questions of surveys.

Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submittedmanuscript and approved submission.Research funding: None declared.Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this article.

References

Ahmed, H., Allaf, M., & Elghazaly, H. (2020). COVID-19 and medical education. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 20(7), 777–778.Basilaia, G., & Kvavadze, D. (2020). Transition to online education in schools during a SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus (COVID-19)

pandemic in Georgia. Pedagogical Research, 5(4). https://doi.org/10.29333/pr/7937.Bellou, I., Papachristos, N. M., & Mikropoulos, T. A. (2018). In Sampson, D., Ifenthaler, D., Spector, J. M., & Isaías, P. (Eds.), Digital

learning technologies in chemistry education: A review BT - digital technologies: Sustainable innovations for improving teachingand learning (pp. 57–80). Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73417-0_4.

Ben-Zvi, R., Hofstein, A., Samuel, D., & Kempa, R. F. (1976a). The effectiveness of filmed experiments in high school chemicaleducation. Journal of Chemical Education, 53(8), 518.

Ben-Zvi, R., Hofstein, A., Samuel, D., & Kempa, R. F. (1976b). The attitude of high school students towards the use of filmedexperiments. Journal of Chemical Education, 53(9), 575.

Broadbent, J., & Poon,W. L. (2015). Self-regulated learning strategies & academic achievement in online higher education learningenvironments: A systematic review. The Internet and Higher Education, 27, 1–13. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1096751615000251.

Canvas Instructure. (2020). Retrieved July 21, 2020 from https://www.instructure.com/canvas/en-au.Centers for Disease Control and PreventionNonpharmaceutical Interverntions (NPIs). (2020). Retrieved July 21, 2020 from

https://www.cdc.gov/nonpharmaceutical-interventions/index.html.D’Ham, C., De Vries, E., Girault, I., & Marzin, P. (2004). Exploiting distance technology to foster experimental design as a neglected

learning objective in labwork in chemistry. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 13(4), 425–434.Dmitrakova, T., Kolesnikova, K., Savankova, N., & Shtein, O. (2019). More than 16 million pupils sit at the desks in Russia. rg.ru.

Retrieved from https://rg.ru/2019/09/01/reg-cfo/za-party-siadut-165-milliona-shkolnikov.html.Green, F. (2020). Schoolwork in lockdown: New evidence on the epidemic of educational poverty. LLAKES Research Papers. Article

67. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823270149.Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockee, B., Trust, T., & Bond, A. (2020). The difference between emergency remote teaching and online

learning. Educause Review. Retrieved July 21, 2020 from https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning.

International Chemistry Tournament. (2020). Retrieved July 21, 2020 from http://ichto.org/.Kennepohl, D. (2007). Using home-laboratory kits to teach general chemistry. Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 8(3),

337–346.

356 E.O. Anokhin et al.: Distance learning of chemistry in Russia during COVID-19

Kimel, H., Bradley, J. D., Durbach, S., Bell, B., & Mungarulire, J. (1998). Hands-on practical chemistry for all: Why and how?Journal of Chemical Education, 75(11), 1406.

Kogan, M., Klein, S. E., Hannon, C. P., & Nolte, M. T. (2020). Orthopaedic education during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Journal ofthe American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, 28(11), e456–e464.

Leung, K., Wu, J. T., Liu, D., & Leung, G. M. (2020). First-wave COVID-19 transmissibility and severity in China outside Hubei aftercontrol measures, and second-wave scenario planning: A modelling impact assessment. The Lancet, 395(10233), 1382–1393.

Morgan, H. (2019). Connecting with educators from abroad via zoom: A powerful teaching method.Multicultural Education, 26(2),36–39.

Over 80% of schools in Russia closed or on vacation from March 23. (2020). Russian News Agency TASS. Retrieved July 21, 2020from https://tass.com/society/1134565.

Paiva, V. T. C., Parma, E., & Buffon, R. (2020). Offering an online chemistry tournament to engage high school students: A 10 Yearexperience in Brazil. Journal of Chemical Education, 97(3), 861–865.

Potgieter, M., Pilcher, L. A., Tekane, R. R., Louw, I., & Fletcher, L. (2019). Lessons learnt from teaching and learning duringdisruptions. In M. Schultz, S. Schmid, & G. A. Lawrie (Eds.), Research and Practice in Chemistry Education: Advances from the25th IUPAC International Conference on Chemistry Education (pp. 89–107). Singapore: Springer Singapore. Retrieved fromhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6998-8_6.

Prat-Resina, X. (2019). Using data-driven activities with ChemEd X Data to practice structure-property relationships in GeneralChemistry. Chemistry Teacher International, 1(1). 20180010.

Sadykov, T., & Čtrnáctová, H. (2019). Application interactive methods and technologies of teaching chemistry. Chemistry TeacherInternational, 1(2). 20180031.

UNESCO. Schools closures caused by Coronavirus (Covid-19). (2020). Retrieved July 21, 2020 from https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse.

Weale, S. (2020). Four in 10 pupils have had little contact with teachers during lockdown. The Guardian. Retrieved fromhttps://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/15/2m-children-in-uk-have-done-almost-no-school-work-in-lockdown.

World Health Organization Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Pandemic. (2020). Retrieved March 31, 2021 from https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus.

Xu, S., & Li, Y. (2020). Beware of the second wave of COVID-19. The Lancet, 395(10233), 1321–1322.Zhilin, D. M. (2013). Chemical experiment in Russian schools. Russian Journal of General Chemistry, 83(4), 819–829.

Supplementary Material: The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/cti-2020-0016).

E.O. Anokhin et al.: Distance learning of chemistry in Russia during COVID-19 357