Home and Virtual University in the Event of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Entanglement of Two Dissimilar Situations

In Iran, with the spread of the COVID-19 virus, daily face-to-face communications were disrupted and transferred to the virtual space. Also, the doors of the universities were suddenly closed and online classes quickly started. Each student connected to the online classes in their own home via laptops or mobile phones, and a link was formed between the inner and outer worlds. The duality of the inner (relationships) and the outer (rules) after the 1979 revolution became an important indicator for the necessity of respecting Islamic rules in public and the relative freedom in inner relationships. Therefore, the linking of the inner to the outer led to the juxtaposition and interference of inner and outer relations. The main purpose of the article is to examine the function of the virtualization of the university and its coming into the homes and the emergence of the unfamiliar and new situation that emerged from it. The article is a type of digital research with the presence of the researcher in the social network Instagram, in which the contents produced about the virtual university and its link with the home were searched, and among them, the Instagram page of a professor of Kharazmi University was selected as a case study due to the large number of audiences who wrote about the lived experience of the link between the virtual university and the home. Based on the results of data analysis, in the link between the virtual university and the home, the space of free relationships in the inner world and the administrative rules of the outer world influenced each other, which was attempted to be controlled by means of visual, auditory, and audio communication channels.