Abstract
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the South African government implemented a policy on 26 March 2020 that prohibited citizens, except for essential workers and people purchasing food and medicine, from leaving their homes. University students with disabilities (SwD) were affected mentally and academically by this pandemic. These changes resulted in them failing or dropping out of university, defaulting on their treatments and changes in their daily lives. University counsellors were obliged to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and were obliged to expeditiously consider how to restructure their work and roles to meet the current needs of SwD by employing online counselling within the universities to offer SwD support to cope with these challenges.
This research examined experiences that SwD faced while making use of the University of Johannesburg’s online counselling services during the COVID-19 lockdown. The study was motivated by the need to bridge the literature gap by identifying the positive and negative experiences that SwD had with online counselling during the COVID-19 lockdown, since online counselling during the lockdown has received little attention in the literature. There seems to be no available literature in South Africa on the experiences of SwD using the universities’ online counselling services, as most of the research that has been developed focuses on the challenges that SwD face with online learning only.
Semi-structured interviews attended by seven postgraduate and undergraduate students at the University of Johannesburg’s SwD with different disabilities were conducted using both WhatsApp video calling and Zoom platforms. Thematic analysis of the transcripts identified four themes: (i) positive experiences UJ’s SwD had with UJ’s online counselling (ii) negative experiences UJ’s SwD had with online counselling; (iii) overcoming challenges with UJ online counselling and (iv) recommendations on improving UJ’s online counselling services. UJ’s online counselling was viewed as helpful and supportive as it is private, cost-effective, without physical barriers; there was no need to travel and problems were managed without recourse to physical contact. However, technological disruptions, load shedding, not being able to see clearly or detect non-verbal cues, limited or no data bundles, too much noise caused by family members and lack of technology skills negatively impacted accessibility of UJ’s online counselling. SwD had to use telephone counselling, reschedule sessions and move to locations that had less or no noise in order to overcome the challenges they had with UJ online counselling. The findings and recommendations propose that UJ’s online counselling can be more useful if: counselling videos are uploaded on UJ’s Blackboard system so that UJ students can access them when needed and data is provided or made available, UJ’s online counselling services
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should be available 24/7 and not only during office hours during the week but also weekends and an online robotic channelling/referral services should be made available.