Students’ resilience strategies in response to the challenges of online teaching and learning during the covid-19 pandemic

Online teaching and learning started to be increasingly adopted by many Institutions of higher learning as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak. Several studies show that online teaching and learning can provide multiple benefits for both staff and students. It support students’ learning experiences in conditions were contact learning is not feasible. However some studies argues that teaching with technology pose a serious challenge for some students as it is not a one size fits all approach. Some Students are left out and experience quite a number of challenges when being taught and learning online. Thus this study aimed to contextually explore the resilience strategies of students in response to the challenges they faced during Online Learning. ‘Non-empirical research design was applied in the methodology of this study. Documents from Search engines such as ‘Google scholar, South African Electronic Thesis or Dissertation (ETD) portal were sampled and reviewed using keywords and phrases that are related to online teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic to filter relevant data, restricted to 2002-2022. The inductive Thematic Content Analysis (TCA) was used to analyze the collected data.Findings shows that some students cope with the challenges of online learning and teaching by employing positive strategies such as seeking for support. Findings also shows that some resort to negative coping strategies such as using drugs and alcohol. Recommendations are developed in this study.