Online Teaching and Academic Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lived Experience of College Students in Mainland China

ABSTRACT

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted the instructional delivery of higher education institutions, with online teaching being implemented suddenly and unprecedentedly. Recent evidence suggests that this urgent move to distance education presents considerable challenges to students, leading to increasing concern over their academic resilience, and physical and mental well-being during the crisis. This chapter aims to investigate how Chinese college students cope with online teaching, focusing on the essential resilience strategies they adopt to overcome the academic difficulties. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 college students from mainland China, who had enrolled in an ESP (English for Specific Purposes) course and had attended over 30 online sessions in 2020. The data were analyzed using grounded theory building and constant comparison method. This study contributes to the understanding of students' resilience in achieving academic success in times of crisis. Drawing on students' perspective, the findings are expected to invite new thinking on support services aimed at helping students tackling unique challenges and enhancing resilience, and to respond to calls for fostering future online pedagogical development. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.