The present study assesses the efficacy of online education in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak, scrutinizes its merits and demerits, pinpoints encountered challenges, and presents targeted solutions. We used the survey in this study. Totally 312 questionnaires were collected. The findings indicate that learners expect online instruction to entail greater interactivity, socialization, personalization, and enhanced technology usability. Although online education provides certain advantages, such as flexibility and cost-effectiveness, it also engenders certain drawbacks such as inadequate opportunities for face-to-face interaction and feedback, high technical requirements, susceptibility to cheating, and insufficient monitoring and feedback. Future investigations could expand the sample size and generalize the findings to real-world contexts.