High school students are affected by the pandemic of covid-19 because they have to study online and study separately from their teachers and friends. Not infrequently students are confused in the online learning system. This creates students feeling of unsecure, with affect their mental health.  In online learning system students’ mental health becomes a concern because it affects students' learning motivation. The purpose of study is to examine the motivation of students to learn in Indonesian public high school during covid -19 pandemic. Motivation is measured through 5 dimensions, namely: general competence belief, interest to learn, learning usefulness value, mastery oriented, and performance oriented. The respondents consisted of students from 13 public high schools in Tangerang, Indonesia. A total of 528 students filled out a questionnaire using google form media. The questionnaire contains 13 questions distributed from February 1, 2021 to February 17, 2021. There are 498 valid questionnaires (44.5% male and 55.5% female). The data were processed and then analyzed using multivariate analysis (MANOVA). The results showed that gender affects students' learning motivation, this is because men have different innate characteristics from female. The mean value of the indicators ‘general competence’ and ‘interest to learn’ for men is higher than for female. Meanwhile, the mean value of the indicators ‘learning usefulness value’, ‘mastery oriented’ and ‘performance oriented’ of female is higher than that of men. The results also show that majors do not affect students' learning motivation when studying online.