Page 101 - Movers, Shapers, and Everything in Between: Influencers of the International Student Experience

For research question 2, the themes that emerged were:
- More inter-campus and intra-campus collaboration in teaching
- IBCs playing a larger role in enrollment, recruitment, and mobility initiatives of the university
- IBCs helped minimize the impact of halted/reduced student mobility on the university
- Progression of a university vision of campuses as equal parts of a global university
A content analysis was performed in which the frequencies of themes were counted by the number of interviewees that expressed that sentiment. This gave a sense of which themes were most prevalent among interviewees (Onwuegbuzie et al., 2009).
reSultS
Qualitative data analysis of the interviews revealed themes that elucidate the research questions. These are presented below.
RQ1: How did the COVID-19 pandemic change the academic experience at IBCs?
All interviewees agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting switch to online learning, has greatly impacted the academic experience at IBCs. In particular, interviewees expressed a belief that their campus was well placed for a quick switch to online delivery due in large part to the pre-existing online learning, infrastructure used for teaching and learning at the IBC. For example, a professor noted that “we used a learning management system (LMS) even before COVID, so we just went back and used it... the transition wasn’t so difficult compared to universities that did not have a platform to fall back on.” The leader of an IBC explained that “normally change at universities is relatively slow, but our model is ‘one university’ and has always had more of a blended model.”
While the top-down view from the leaders’ perspectives suggested a seamless transition to online learning, academic lecturers and
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Effects of COVID-19 on IBCs
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