Assessment of Online Study Abroad Programs from the Students’ Perspectives

Abstract

Since the onset of the pandemic, Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT) has been actively switching from travel-based study abroad programs to online study abroad programs, guided by the principle “Do not compromise students’ learning opportunities”. As a result, SIT has managed not only to maintain existing study abroad programs, but also to further expand new programs and collaborative workshops. This paper investigates the effectiveness of SIT’s online study abroad programs in the Japanese academic year (AY) 2021, the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research data mainly includes (1) participants’ interest and satisfaction with the program, (2) participants’self-assessment of their English language proficiency according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), and (3) global competency scores measured by the Miville-Guzman Universality-Diversity Scale-Short form (MGUDS-S) . With the recent relaxation of travel restrictions, there has been a move towards the resumption of study abroad programs which involve actual travel abroad. Therefore, it’s worth discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the current generation of online study abroad programs that SIT has, as a background to considering the overall future direction of SIT’s study abroad programs under the ‘new normal’ of a world emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.