This study attempts to explore how the lockdown/containment measures taken by the government during the COVID‐19 pandemic have threatened educated Muslim women's negotiated identity regarding wifehood and motherhood in urban Pakistan and how they struggle to reposition to reconstruct it. Through semi‐structured interviews, making an in‐depth comparative study of three differently situated cases (Muslim women), this study argues that the abnormal situation that has ensued from the pandemic has reinforced the vulnerability of women's nascent negotiated identity by landing them in a space where they are supposed by the normative structures to step back to carrying out their traditional responsibilities as ‘good’ wife and mother during the crisis. It has found that the pandemic has similarity in its impacts for the women in their familial lives, despite their being variously situated and resistive, due to the general religio‐culturally defined patriarchal social behaviour of the place (Pakistan) toward women and lack of action on the part of the state for implementing its laws of women's empowerment.

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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained attention from learners and teachers across the globe, but high dropout rate is a matter of concern, which makes it imperative to understand the reasons. From the theoretical perspective that learners learn more effectively through collaborative and socially cohesive communities, this qualitative study is focused to understand how learners experience facilitated and nonfacilitated MOOCs. It attempts to explore learners' perspectives from two different groups of learners learning the same MOOC of English for journalism. One of the groups is facilitated for the first week of the course by instructors through face-to-face interactions, whereas the other is not. The perspectives of the learners from both groups regarding their experiences are analyzed through comparative and contrastive thematic analysis of the data collected through participant observation and semistructured interviews of focus groups selected through purposive sampling technique. Though learning the same ESP MOOC, the learners (18-35 in age; all of them university students), register partly similar and largely contrastive learning experiences across the facilitated and nonfacilitated MOOC environments. It is found that the learners, when facilitated, develop a stronger sense of belongingness, accountability, responsibility, peer competition, networking, and solution of issues, which results in retention of the learners. This study foregrounds the effectiveness of hybrid MOOCs, in terms of retention and satisfaction of learners.

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