Higher education is an environment that presents many potential stressors to higher education students, whose increasingly prevalent stress has been documented over the past decades (for a review, see Robotham & Julian, 2006). More recently, university students’ poor mental health has alerted higher education institutions (HEIs) to the importance of addressing undergraduates’ stress levels; university studies, although naturally challenging, may also be overwhelming and affect degree completion, which in turn affects university reputation and funding (Beer & Lawson, 2017; Harris, Casey, Westbury, & Florida-James, 2016). Hence, the sustainability of HEIs is affected, which is also connected to the additional revenue from international Master’s degree programmes (IMDPs) offered by universities in response to changes in global economy and internationalisation trends.

The global COVID-19 pandemic presents a special case regarding wellbeing and stress of all people. While the immediate psychological responses to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are being internationally explored among the general, health-care and clinical populations (Talevi et al., 2020), the pandemic circumstances present interesting ecological conditions within which to examine international Master’s degree students’ (IMDSs) well-being. Thus, this study contributes to the growing discourse on university students’ well-being by exploring changes in IMDSs’ well-being in relation to the move to online teaching and learning at a Finnish university during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The increasing internalisation of higher education in recent years has drawn scholarly attention to international university students’ subjective experiences. Well-being can be understood as a higher-order construct pertaining to a sense of satisfaction with one’s condition of existence, involving health, happiness and prosperity (Zhou & Parmanto, 2020). A definition of well-being can more integratively include “being at ease with oneself, having meaning and fulfilment, experiencing positive emotions, being resilient and belonging to a respectful community” (Campion & Nurse, 2007, cited in Henning et al., 2018, p. 1). Thus, well-being can not only be clinically operationalised to examine depression, anxiety, stress and substance abuse, but also psychologically operationalised to examine subjective evaluations of life satisfaction (Hattie, Myers, & Sweeney, 2004). In this study, international students’ well-being is conceptualised as a construct entailing satisfaction with one’s life on subjective, psychological and sociocultural levels in the host country.

This study reports on the opinions and experiences respondents volunteered in response to an open-ended question and answers the following research question: What changes in well-being did international Master’s degree students describe in relation to the move to online teaching and learning at a Finnish university during the COVID -19 pandemic.

The respondents were students enrolled in international Master’s degree programmes at a Finnish university. A survey including two questionnaires and an open-ended question was distributed through an online platform from June to early August 2020. These questionnaires measured university students’ perceived sources of academic stress and the negative emotional states of depression, anxiety and stress. To account for changes in the university’s provision of education during the nation-wide lockdown against the spread of COVID-19 as a possible source of stress for IMDSs (see also Elmer et al., 2020), an open-ended question was included at the end of the survey: “The COVID-19 pandemic has recently affected teaching and learning at [the university]. Please shortly share your emotional experience or opinion here.” While the response rate to the survey was low (N = 41), most respondents (N = 37, average age 29.03 years) chose to answer the open-ended question. Some answers were short (2-29 words; 10 answers), most were moderately long (31-68 words; 23 answers), and four were notably long (114-494 words). This study focuses on respondents’ voluntary answers to the open-ended question. A preliminary analysis of the open-ended question data involved a quantitative content analysis providing a co-occurrence network that enables grasping an overview and visualising the features and potential relationships in the text data (Higuchi, 2016). KH Coder automatically extracts words from data and systematically generates a picture while mitigating researcher bias (Higuchi, 2016). In the picture KH Coder draws, meanings of the relationships of the words can be analysed through understanding which words appear frequently and how each word connects to one another. The main analysis approached the data in the open-ended question thematically to provide a more intricate connection with the account from which the codes of the quantitative content analysis were drawn. The thematic analysis was informed by a post-structural ontology, whereby language and the ways we use language to create discourses are integral to constituting our social and psychological realities (Braun & Clarke, 2013, p. 189). Two distinct themes were developed concerning respondents’ well-being in relation to the university moving to online teaching and learning.

The first theme concerned respondents’ well-being with regard to their friends and families, whereas the second theme concerned respondents’ well-being with regard to their studies. First, these themes jointly highlight IMDSs’ need for social connections in the host country. The respondents’ diminished social interaction with others seemed to affect their psychological well-being while self-isolating at home, and their diminished interaction with classmates due to online teaching seemed to influence a sense of well-being in relation to their commitment to learning and studying. Interacting cooperatively in distance teaching and learning may also come to play a more important role in international students’ well-being. Second, the themes jointly highlight the IMDSs’ challenges in coping with the situation affecting study-related responsibilities and mental health. Some respondents found it difficult to concentrate and motivate themselves to complete coursework, attend online lectures, and continue with their thesis. Concentration was especially affected when university facilities for studying were inaccessible and the home environment was either distracting or dull. Deterioration of mental health because of lockdown circumstances further included worry about the health of family and friends, poor sleep quality, and increased anxiety and stress, which enhanced concentration and motivation difficulties, as well as feeling unproductive. As an indicator of reduced psychological well-being and poor coping, this can interfere with students’ emotional state as well as engagement, persistence and performance in their studies (Akhtar & Kroener-Herwig, 2019; Moses, Bradley, & O’Callaghan, 2016). Deterioration of mental health may further be indicative of lower life satisfaction, attenuated optimism and a decreased sense of self-efficacy, which are important predictors of stress (Saleh et al., 2017). Especially considering the restricted autonomy and outlets for negative emotional or mental states during a lockdown, it is important to help international students navigate experienced tensions directly or indirectly affecting their studies.

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