Online Learning as a Resilient Approach During COVID-19 Pandemic: Reviewing the Challenges with Prospects

Abstract

It is important to observe the effectiveness of online learning (OL) as a resilient approach for the smooth functioning of the educational systems in the post-pandemic for resilience purposes. This paper defines resilience as learners' capacity to cope with a crisis like COVID-19 and recover quickly from the challenges and prospects caused by the pandemic. Hence, this paper aims to find out the extent to which the use of OL in higher education institutions (HEIs) has served as a resilient means of accessing education in selected South and South East Asian countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper uses a literature review method and adopts the integrative literature review approach. The reviewed literature was subjected to a content analysis method in order to provide the themes relevant to address the objectives of this paper. The results indicate that in the context of South and South East Asia, particularly in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, there are country-specific differences in adopting OL as a resilient approach in HEIs. For instance, in China, OL was a "forced innovation" during the pandemic. However, this paper concludes that nearly all South Asian nations took recourse to OL during the pandemic without a proper understanding of the pedagogical implications of OL. Hence, the recommendation is that OL cannot be fully utilized unless critical issues like learners' engagement, investments, digital divides, infrastructure, and governmental and leadership support are properly addressed and assessed. Another recommendation is for policy guidance, especially in the South Asian developing countries in the post-pandemic contexts, to consider the best practices of OL as resilient strategies for sustainable education in HEIs.

Received: 1 February 2025 | Revised: 21 April 2025 | Accepted: 7 July 2025

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Author Contribution Statement

Ritimoni Bordoloi: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration. Prasenjit Das: Conceptualization, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration. Kezia Herman Mkwizu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration.