Success

Developing a study abroad program is a significant investment of your time and energy. It’s important then to periodically take stock of how the program is evolving. The essential question is ‘have you accomplished what you set out to do? And ‘how do you know?’ You’ll be asked to answer that question each year of the program. Periodically, your college may take a closer look as well in 3-5 year cycle of program review. In this section, I’d like to outline the resources and approaches that are available to you for this important question.

Student feedback

The primary motivation behind all study abroad programming it to offer rich learning opportunities that add value to our student’s experience. Consequently, looking at student performance and feedback is a key component. In this process, you may wish to use the following sources:

• Program evaluations provided by OSA. These questionnaires are primarily a customer satisfaction survey, not a tool to measure learning. They can provide you with indications of areas that are working particularly well or may need more focus. Observing how these satisfaction scores evolve over successive editions of a program is a useful approach.
• Course evaluations. In addition to the overall program evaluation form provided by OSA, faculty-led programs should also administer course evaluations, per departmental practice. Just like on-campus courses, these can provide useful information.
• Ad-hoc surveys. You may wish to devise a specific survey of students to look at how a new programming feature was perceived, or other aspects of your program.
• Student performance. Tracking GPA can be a useful tool for observing trends in the program, e.g. mean GPA of the cohort, evolution of course GPA over successive editions of the program, etc.
• Student output. Many faculty leaders use reflective journaling as a powerful tool to mentor student’s processing of an intensive learning experience. Some academic disciplines have established methods for analyzing reflective writing. At the least, student journals can be a powerful source of how students are experiencing the program and can provide you with trends or anecdotes. The same is true of student projects, final papers, presentations, etc. Some leaders have used unstructured interviews and focus groups as well as a way of periodically gauging how the program is doing.

Faculty input

No one knows better than the instructor and program leader how the program has gone. Your own notes taken as the program progresses, as well as your wrap-up notes after you’ve returned to campus, can be powerful sources to help you decide if you are meeting the objectives you set for yourself. You may also seek the input of other faculty on the program, whether co-leaders from MSU or guest lecturers overseas.

Some MSU leaders undertake a serious research design with the intention of publishing in peer-reviewed journals on their programming efforts. We encourage this approach and can offer some support (PDF)* to this end. However, that is not the goal for all programs. We simply want to encourage you to consider a variety of approaches and sources as you report on how your program is meeting the objectives you developed.

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