Exploring student anxiety when starting in a joint international Master’s programme

ABSTRACT

There are a handful of programmes in higher education that offer students a joint international study programme and research shows that students have certain levels of anxiety when starting studying in such graduate programmes. This study aimed to explore levels of student anxiety and investigates the prerequisite skills in order to better prepare students for studying in an international Master programme of Marine Biological Resources with 10 European campuses in seven countries. We applied mixed-methods including online questionnaires and interviews capturing student experiences and teachers’ perspectives. Results show that especially mature and non-native English-speaking students experience anxiety and that there is a high class-heterogeneity in terms of academic background and life experience. This may simultaneously act as a barrier for and enable learning. The presented results show a need to improve the student acculturation process in international programmes. This could be done by better communicating expectations and by providing resources for social, methodological, and pedagogical skills. More specific strategies are a) prerequisite courses that use quantitative measurements as the most significant causes of anxiety, b) educators to better state what a good practice of learning in their course is, c) mixing local and international students in courses i.e. groupwork or other class interactivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Student experience
• student anxiety
• international master
• preparing students
• higher education
• Erasmus mundus

Acknowledgments

We thank the students who participated in the survey. Special thanks go to the teachers who gave their time and views on this issue and for their dedication to teaching and improving teaching practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Erasmus Mundus Master IMBRSea which is funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union (2016-2280) and was carried out in conjunction with the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC-ERIC).

Notes on contributors

Julia Jung

Julia Jung is an interdisciplinary marine social scientist. She holds a BSc (Hons) in marine and freshwater biology from Edinburgh Napier university and is currently completing her Master’s degree in management of marine biological resources. Her research focuses on community-based natural resource management and linkages between environmental health and human well-being, especially in the global South. Additionally, she has worked extensively on student learning and teaching practice in higher education, for example, as part of the ‘Students as Colleagues’ project aimed to improve staff-student relationships. Her research interests also include education using immersive technologies and student learning, leadership and participation in higher education.

Isa Jahnke

Isa Jahnke is Associate Professor of learning technologies at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She holds a Ph.D. from Dortmund university in Germany. She was assistant professor at TU Dortmund in Germany, then professor of interactive media and learning at Umea University in Sweden. She is director of the Information Experience Lab, a user experience and learning design lab at the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies. Her interests include student-centred learning with technologies, active learning spaces, creativity in engineering education, and teaching/learning practices with emergent and immersive technologies.

Tim Deprez

Tim Deprez has a background in marine taxonomy, specialising in taxonomic databases. Since 2008 he has been largely involved in organisational aspects of higher education, and developed the EConsort software for managing educational programmes. He teaches 4 Masters courses at Ghent University and is a guest lecturer at 2 European universities. From 2011-2016 he coordinated the Erasmus Mundus MARES Doctoral Programme. From 2012 onwards, he was involved in major European marine training initiatives which led to the development of the European Marine Training platform. Since 2015 he has also been strongly involved in the Belgian pillar of EMBRC. Tim is the coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus EMBC+ and IMBRSea programme.