Reaching for community resilience in distance education: lessons learnt from top-tier American universities during the COVID-19 pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, universities were incited to adapt to the drastic transition to distance education as an effective response to an unprecedented necessity. Hence, the concern was to achieve distance educational resilience through preserving educational quality and minimising the side effects of this transition. To indicate how five high-ranked American universities, given their quintessential role worldwide, tackled this resilience, their approaches, conducts and pedagogies were examined through utilising ATLAS.ti software and reflexive thematic analysis. The findings showed achieving resilience demands not only instructors’ content and pedagogical knowledge but also their context-sensitivity to the dynamics of their fields and students. This revitalised instructors’ agency was shown to be constructed as a dynamic act in five macro strategies of inciting interactivity, envisioning a planned pedagogy, providing feedback and assessment, securing connectivity and grading alternatives. The study reveals that distance resilience as a construct requires sensitivity to students’ educational needs.