Digital resilience in higher education in response to COVID-19 pandemic: Student Perceptions from Asia and Australia

Abstract

COVID-19 has transformed higher education learning and teaching practices globally. Tertiary students, internationally face both opportunities and challenges in learning and adapting to this paradigm shift in the delivery of education. It remains unclear how students in international contexts are responding to these changes in digital learning during and post-COVID-19. This paper aims to compare student perceptions of digital competence, confidence, and resilience in present times using data from surveys of tertiary students from Australia, Cambodia, China, India, and Malaysia. There are disparities not only in the teaching and learning pedagogies amongst these countries but also in the levels of technological advancement, infrastructure support, and pace of digital innovation in the delivery of courses. These differences have put in focus students’ both digital competencies and resilience as they pursue higher education on various digital learning platforms. Resilience includes the ability to bounce back or adapt from stress (Smith et al., 2008) Digital resilience is students’ tech-savviness and preparedness to adapt to different digital environments as they pursue higher education. This paper examines the perceptions of tertiary undergraduate students from these countries in this emerging new digital learning norm-. A total of 687 tertiary students from the aforementioned countries participated in a survey to questions related to digital competence, confidence in using and/or adapting to digital innovation, and resilience. Statistically significant attributes are identified to help better understand the challenges these culturally diverse students perceive in digital learning environments. This study will reveal barriers that impact the digital transformation of undergraduate students which can be used to recommend necessary teaching and learning support frameworks to enhance their digital competence and resilience. This will help tertiary institutions better equip all stakeholders in adapting to the new normal of higher education in the future.

Digital Resilience Among Individuals in School Education Settings: A Concept Analysis Based on a Scoping Review

“…They believed that an individual is cognitively well placed to adopt new technologies and accept digital transformation as a way to rebound from disruptive events. Meanwhile, Eri et al ( 13 ) declared digital resilience as an individual’s psychological capacity to remain functional by recovering from, adapting to, and learning from adversities stemming from the use of digital technology in the tertiary educational context. Obviously, recovery is a vital part of individual development in adopting new digital technology.…”

“…The examples of external factors include environment, content, service, policy, and support ( 4 , 28 , 34 ). Environment includes any access point to the internet from private to public spaces, which makes people exposed to stressors such as distance learning and training environments ( 13 ). Content includes entertainment and educational content, the terms of service, and any messaging about the use of digital technologies that provide or deliver to the users and may be unhelpful or useless, or even harmful ( 32 ).…”

“…Digital literacy can be used to evaluate information reflecting their capabilities to manage their life and work/learning tasks using digital technologies ( 19 ). In addition, individuals need psychological resources to develop resilience under the threat of the online and offline world, including self-control ( 32 ), self-reflection ( 33 , 46 ), self-confidence ( 13 ), self-efficacy ( 12 , 46 ), and self-esteem ( 33 ) as positive factors of psychological traits. From the individual viewpoint, digital resilience is understood as a proactively interactive concept dealing with the aggregation of individuals’ severe risk experiences with different relatively favorable psychological resources.…”

“…Later, this concept was widely expanded into the human psychobehavioral aspect. Eri et al ( 13 ) extended the theory of social–ecological resilience in the digital technology context and defined digital resilience as the ability of learners to overcome technological difficulties and persist with online learning as they adapt to the changing trends in higher education. However, digital resilience firstly occurred in school education settings due to the massive open online courses and open-access publishing.…”

“…From the abovementioned studies, the definition of digital resilience remains to be heterogeneous across different studies. Furthermore, in the social psychological behavior of digital resilience among different populations, some studies even gave controversial results ( 13 , 21 ). In addition, some concepts or phrases exist that have similar meanings to that of digital resilience (e.g., information literacy or digital literacy), which are likely to cause confusion.…”