International Business Curricula: Responding to COVID-19 Challenges

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought significant changes to the world and is still impacting our work and life. There are likely to be some permanent impacts on our lives and higher education of this pandemic. In fact, higher education was in decline well before the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, US College enrollments have been declining every year since 2011 (down three million from 20 million students since then), while public university costs have increased 28% over the same period (Lee 2022). This decline in the number of students is likely to be long-lasting as it is driven by demographics, i.e., too few babies are born in the US. In addition, the COVID-19 led to disruptions in supply chains, and the slowdown in economies meant even fewer resources were available to higher education (Alon 2020). During the pandemic, traditional education methods heavily relied on face-to-face interactions became dangerous. Thus, COVID-19 hit US higher education with an enormous negative impact. The impact was similarly devastating in other developed countries and often more severe in less developed countries. As such, the effect of COVID 19 on higher education has been immediate, disruptive, and overwhelming, and institutions around the world had to react and respond quickly to the spread of the virus. We hope that the global pandemic will end soon in the future, but we also expect that some of the economic and social changes caused by the pandemic will remain even after the pandemic is vanquished. Business educators need to adapt to the enduring changes to both the business world and higher education, which is even more true for international business educators. The impact of the global pandemic on international business, compared to other business disciplines, is undoubtfully more intrusive and radical, as the IB discipline sets its roots in operating at an international or global scale. In the following few paragraphs, we highlight some challenges that IB educators face in the process of adapting to the “new normal” of the postpandemic world. But, more importantly, we want to encourage educators to channel these COVID-19-related challenges into opportunities for developing pedagogies, curriculums, and programs that can better satisfy the shifting nature of education, especially in the IB domain. JOURNAL OF TEACHING IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS 2021, VOL. 32, NOS. 3–4, 195–201 https://doi.org/10.1080/08975930.2022.2043686