In recent months an energetic discussion has emerged among the education community around the world on COVID-19’s impact on international higher education. The range of opinions seems to fall along two basic extremes: reassurance and panic. On the reassurance end, some are arguing that there will hardly be any disruption to internationalization as we have known it and predict only a temporary decrease and slight restriction of traditional mobility patterns. On the panic end, many are warning that this crisis will hugely transform international education for the foreseeable future, devastate all current facets of programming and practice, and cause a likely permanent rethinking in our practice.

Indeed, these are challenging times and yet, emerging developments suggest we may very well be at the beginning of a new era for international education, one which will challenge us to reexamine well-established practices, reframe our priorities and pursue emerging opportunities. Transforming immediate challenges into opportunities requires significant expertise, intense collaboration and innovative thinking.

It also appears that the pandemic has accelerated changes in international education that have been in motion for years. What were once peripheral strategies employed by a few institutions are now gaining traction by many and thus, broadening the scope and direction of international education as we have known it. Success in a new era of international education will require that we recognize that the status quo was supported by an environment that is now gone. Future opportunities will not be found in defending the status quo. Rather, institutions must innovate and change, and not just by doing things differently, but by doing different things. This certainly requires reframing the curricula to be more responsive to a new generation of internationally-engaged learners, exploring expanded uses of virtual technology and online education to bring together once disparate populations in meaningful ways, and leveraging international partnerships and linkages that are truly synergistic and based on shared and reciprocal interests.

The value and importance of international learning and engagement remains strong. It is still a goal of many institutions to graduate learners who have nuanced understandings of the international dimensions of their chosen disciplines and intercultural competency needed to live and work successfully in a globally interconnected world. What is changing however is the focus and methodologies with which these outcomes are achieved. Although internationalizing the campus and the curriculum has always been important, the dominant focus of international education at many institutions has been concerned with student and scholar mobility. In other words, if international education can be conceptualized along a continuum, the focus has traditionally been skewed to one end where optional international opportunities have been offered to an exclusive group of mobile learners

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