Page 123 - Movers, Shapers, and Everything in Between: Influencers of the International Student Experience
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The results support the hypothesis, revealing higher mean satisfaction among international students enrolled at home campuses in the areas of Academic and Teaching Quality, Academic Environment, and Academic Engagement than international students enrolled at international branch campuses. Including controls in the model explained some of the variance in satisfaction. Both satisfaction with the academic environment and academic engagement depended on which university the student was enrolled in, while the student’s gender and stage of study had no significant effect on satisfaction with any area of the academic experience.
There are no large-scale quantitative studies of differences in student satisfaction at IBCs and home universities, which makes these findings compelling. There are several plausible possibilities for why we found differences in student satisfaction between IBCs and home campuses. First, because most degree programs originate from home campuses, academic content may be adapted to students and the IBC environment to varying degrees. A study of Australian IBCs found that “universities are responsible for curriculum, teaching and assessment, and quality assurance; the responsibility for provision of study location, marketing, promotion, and financial administration rests with the offshore partner” (Banks et al., 2010). Shams and Huisman (2012) also state, “The challenge for the university therefore, seems to be to localize the curriculum while at the same time trying to offer identical courses, degrees, and learning experience to both groups of students” (p. 110). If the context and student body of the home campus is the default in designing the formal curriculum and academic support, students enrolled at IBC may feel that it is not as well tailored to their needs.
Teaching is one of the main activities of a university, and directly affects students’ educational experience (Athiyaman, 2001). Some studies have found that IBCs face challenges in ensuring student satisfaction with teaching; this “highlights the issue of differing levels of satisfaction with University (Australian) and local (offshore) instructors among students of the evaluated programmes where both
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Discussion and Conclusions
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