As we mark the year point of this pandemic, I think we can look back and find some positive changes among the tragic loss and discombobulation of the past 12 months.  Readers of this blog are likely aware that the traditional components of my profession, inbound and outbound international student mobility, have been, more or less, at a standstill since the start of the pandemic. The profession has collectively held it’s breath and quietly hunkered down hoping to avoid the attention of provosts and campus CFO’s looking to restructure, down-size or eliminate an administrative unit that was no longer seen as producing revenue for the university’s bottom line. Many of us spent the last weeks of the spring 2020 semester (or longer into summer) recovering from the stress and trauma of evacuating hundreds of students back to their home countries and/or bringing our own students home safely from every corner of the globe. As the virus waxed and waned across the globe, international educators endured a roller-coaster of expectations and disappointments about resuming the recruitment of international students and the enrollment of study abroad students for overseas programs. But, despite uncertainty overload, the intrepid international educators held a steady hand at the helm and, using their own expertise dealing with ambiguity and the unknown, moved their profession towards a new iteration. 

This new landscape, not unlike a foreign country with it’s own language and customs, to many international educators, is the burgeoning domain of remote, on-line, and virtual education. The move to on-line education is quite a striking pivot for a profession that has always been predicated on international travel and mobility. Despite having little or no experience with remote education, the international education community quickly swung into action to confirm with the Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) the legality for F-1 visa students taking 100% on-line courses for the remainder of the spring 2020 term.  It was this key watershed moment that international educators embraced on-line education and have yet to look back. Through their support of on-line education, by summer 2020, international educators made it possible for newly admitted international students to start their US higher education experience from their home countries as the globe continued to weather the pandemic. International educators quickly mastered the “language and customs” of Zoom, Teams, and Meet Up to support their international students, in the US and abroad, with the new on-line academic landscape. 

At almost the same time international educators from the education abroad sector, began looking at opportunities for students to participate in study abroad, virtually. Faculty showed tremendous ingenuity and imagination as they re-purposed already planned faculty-led programs to be fully on-line. At my institution an ambitious Occupational Therapy professor revamped her mental healthcare in Ireland course, to include virtual visits to museums, guest speakers from Irish mental health facilities and a final party with an Irish folk music and (optional) Guinness drinking. Another highly enthusiastic Spanish professor incorporated virtual Mexican cooking and folklorico (folk dancing) to a course originally planned to be taught in Mexico. The response from the students was overwhelmingly positive. Virtual study abroad was also embraced for internships and project-based learning. The on-line format proved to be highly successful in connecting students from around the world using industry tools, such as Slack or MS Teams, to work projects for global businesses. In some ways virtual internships create a more focused environment that allows for faster intensive intercultural interactions between students. For better or worse virtual internships remove some of the “distractions” of in-person cultural adaptation, such as jet-lag, culture shock, and/or health issues. Additionally, in the virtual world the cultural playing field is leveled and the issues of cultural privilege are greatly diminished. 

Given the initial success and positive embrace of virtual international education during the year of COVID-19, it’s hard to imagine international educators not continuing on this upward trajectory. Hopefully, it will serve to offer more opportunities for students to increase their intercultural knowledge and global engagement both in-person and virtually. And as educational technology becomes more useful and relevant to international education (including learning/enrollment management systems, partnerships databases, language learning apps, etc), globally connecting students and faculty will become more commonplace and really drive efforts to find global solutions to global issues.