Page 96 - Movers, Shapers, and Everything in Between: Influencers of the International Student Experience

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Chapter 5
Academy, 2014), including both the informal and formal curriculum (Leask, 2009).
Nearly all higher education institutions (HEIs) transitioned to online teaching at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (Johnson et al., 2020), greatly changing the academic experience for most students. Research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education students shows a variety of effects, particularly related to wellbeing (Debowska et al., 2020; Dodd et al., 2021; Kakuchi, 2021) and the academic experience (Baber, 2020; Basuony et al., 2021; Fatani, 2020; Means & Neisler, 2020). Understanding the effects of the switch to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic is important due to the unprecedented nature of the situation: as one study’s authors pointed out, “well-planned online learning experiences are meaningfully different from courses offered online in response to a crisis or disaster” (Hodges et al., 2020, p. 1).
This study focuses on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the academic experience IBCs and changed the relationship between the IBC and home campus. No academic research looking specifically at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on IBCs has yet been published, to the authors’ knowledge, making this study the first of its kind. It focuses on IBCs located in Malaysia from universities in the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia, for reasons described in the following section.
the mAlAySiA Context
Malaysia was selected as the host country in this research because it is often regarded as an “education hub”, due in part to favorable government policies toward TNE as well as a large student market. Malaysia accounts for 40% of enrollments of ASEAN students that study abroad within the region (Atherton et al., 2018), and TNE management processes in Malaysia are “generally well developed”, according to an analysis by the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA, 2020).