International Students’ Acceptance of Online Learning During Pandemic: Some Exploratory Findings

The COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 has impacted campus life in many ways, including shifting to online mode of teaching and learning, restricting face-to-face communication and activities, and forming of new norms of education. This paper investigates impacts of the pandemic to the way international students taking class and doing research, the satisfaction level, and obstacles of international students in Japan to online learning, as well as the factors which may influence the students’ acceptance of online learning, A questionnaire containing both Likert-style and open-ended questions were sent to all international students at a university in Japan. Almost half of the non-research international students reported that their taking class was impacted, while almost 30% of graduate international students reported that their doing research was impacted during the pandemic. Japanese proficiency, years of enrollment and family status are found to be associated with impact on taking class. Access to supportive information from university is found associated with satisfaction level of online learning. These findings imply further investigation may need to be conducted for more evidence on whether that acceptance of online learning could be associated with certain factors, and if online learning could be a new norm of education.