Developing an evidence-based faculty-led study abroad business course

Study abroad experiences are highly valuable as internationalization plays an increasingly important role in the higher education curriculum and business (Ghemawat & Bastian, 2017). Business schools have long recognized the value of the study abroad experience for both students and faculty (Black & Duhon, 2006). Given these conditions, one would expect best practices to be widely applied in the execution of short-term study abroad programs. Yet, this study’s review and analysis of faculty-led study abroad proposal guidelines did not find this to be the case. Content analysis was used on 396 pages of university faculty-led study abroad proposal guidelines from 19 randomly chosen universities in the United States to determine what best practices are being communicated to faculty. Our findings suggest that there is little evidence-based guidance on creating, planning, and executing a short-term faculty-led study abroad course. Building on this finding, we provide a review of the best practices literature and use this corpus to anchor a tutorial for designing a faculty-led study abroad course. These instructions provide business faculty with the information necessary to design a successful evidence-based short-term study abroad program.