Study abroad education has become an increasingly important educational program for teaching global learning and intercultural competence, maturity, and sensitivity of students. However, tuition costs of study abroad tours can be daunting. Thus, the question arises how value can be defined and, more importantly, how value is created. This chapter adopts the lens of service-dominant logic (SDL) and value co-creation to suggest that students should be engaged as an active co-creator of their study abroad experience. Based on focus groups and an analysis of student reflection papers, this chapter proposes that the value process of short-term, faculty-led study abroad tours consists of three stages: (1) value proposition and potential, (2) resource integration and value co-creation, and (3) assessment of value realization. The framework provides faculty with a way to understand, adapt, and manage the resource integration and influence students' perceptions of their study abroad experience.
TopIntroduction
Over the last decade, student mobility and study abroad programs have
become an increasingly important topic in higher education (HE).
Universities worldwide promote learning abroad as part of their
internationalization agenda that aims to help students enhance
personal growth, intercultural competence, global outlooks, and
employability (Gribble &
Tran, 2016). The annual ‘Open Doors’ survey finds that
study abroad participation has steadily increased over the last
decade (IIE, 2018). In
2016/17, over 332,000 US students studied abroad for academic credit
(IIE, 2018), compared to
283,000 in 2011/12 (Redden,
2013). And according to the International Consultants for
Education and Fairs (ICEF) approximately five million tertiary
students were studying abroad in 2016, an increase of 67% since 2005
(International Research and
Analysis Unit, 2016).
International student mobility can be divided broadly into two
categories: (1) degree mobility, i.e., students seeking fully
degrees in foreign countries and (2) intra-degree student mobility
or learning abroad i.e., students include an international learning
experience as part of their domestically delivered degree (Gribble & Tran, 2016).
Furthermore, learning abroad can take different forms, from semester
and year-long programs to short-term, two- to four-week intensive
study tours. The focus in this chapter is limited only to
short-term, faculty-led study abroad programs which are defined as
one to eight-weeks in duration (Gaia,
2015).
Semester-long programs do not involve necessarily an active learning
component since students attend courses at another institution
(Simpson & Pham,
2007), whereas short-term study abroad tours, as course
components, provide educators with opportunities to achieve holistic
education (Ritz, 2011).
Research shows that study abroad is related to students’ development
of global and intercultural competencies, self-knowledge and
self-management, and increased academic performance and graduation
rates (Gaia,
2015;
Rowan-Kenyon & Niehaus,
2011; Stebleton et al.,
2013). However, despite the growing popularity of shorter
study abroad tours, little is known about how students make meaning
of study abroad experiences (Rowan-Kenyon & Niehaus, 2011) and the mechanisms
for enhancing their perceived value. Díaz-Méndez & Gummesson (2012) argue that ‘value
that students expect and actually obtain (…) is a result of the
conjunction between lecturers’ teaching quality and their learning
capabilities’ (p. 576). The authors further note that a
student-lecturer relationship ‘requires being approached from a
value co-creation perspective’ (p. 576).