Topic: Philip G. Altbach, an internationally renowned comparative education scholar, once said that “internationalization is changing the world’s education, and globalization is changing the world's internationalization” (Altbach, 2009). The wave of economic globalization beginning in the 20th century has had a profound impact on the internationalization of education in the world. Since the reform and opening-up policy in 1978, Chinese universities have carried out the practice and exploration of the internationalisation of higher education. Many Chinese universities have cooperated with universities overseas and set up quantities of joint institutes, which have greatly promoted the influx of foreign students and teachers (Ye & Wang, 2018). With the continuous development of the internationalisation of higher education, its present forms have become diversified, among which the mobility of transnational academic has been widely concerned by the national government and academic researchers. In recent years, Chinese national government have continuously introduced a series of new policies and measures to attract excellent international faculty memembers, recognizing the contribution of them including improving the quality of faculty teams, and promoting the cooperation between domestic and foreign universities. Relevant studies also show that international faculty members play a significant role in helping universities improve their international competitiveness, reputation, and output of international research cooperation, and are becoming an indispensable role in the process of internationalisation of higher education(Mahroum, 2000; Altbach & Yudkevich, 2017; Huang & Wu, 2018). However, the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has had a significant impact on the internationalisation of global higher education.

Against this background, this empirical study aims at probing the following research questions: 1) tounderstand international faculty's teaching input at the department-level, including energy (whether international faculty members have attached great importance to teaching design, use relevant teaching theories, innovate teaching methods, interact with students, reflect on teaching, discuss teaching tasks with colleagues, update teaching content, carry out teaching research, etc.), emotion (faculty's attitudes towards students and teaching, attitudes towards the importance of teaching, time allocation) and time (teachers teaching quantity, average hours per week investing on  preparation for the courses, contact frequency with the student at an extracurricular time, time spent on teaching improvement, team discussion, etc.); 2) to find out the factors that affect international faculty's teaching input. The influencing factors include personal factors (age, gender, working years, family, nationality, Chinese language proficiency, academic field, etc.), cognitive factors (faculty members' perception of their roles, faculty members' actual behavior, etc.), and environmental factors (e.g. international situation, university and school policies, recruitment process, colleges, students, faculty teams, etc.).

Significance: As the research on internationalisation of higher education is becoming more and more mature, quantities of academic scholars focus their research on international students. However, only a few studies focus on international faculty in colleges and universities (Wu & Huang, 2018). The theoretical significance of this study lies in the further expansion of the relevant international typology theory of international faculty and the connotation of the related job demands-resource model. This study combines the relevant model framework including Berry’s acculturation theory and Kahn’s job demands-resource model and applies them to new research content to fully expand and discuss the suitability of relevant theories under different research topics. Moreover, this study aims to provide suggestions for the development of the internationalisation of higher education in colleges and universities, the construction of international faculty teams, and the quality assurance of higher education and talent training.

Theoretical framework: The theoretical framework of this study mainly includes process perspective, the acculturation theory related to the cross-cultural environment experienced by international faculty in China and the job demands-resource model of teachers' teaching input.

Methodology: This research is mainly qualitative research by using semi-structured interviews. Combined with the research questions and relevant theoretical framework of this study, the actual development process of this study mainly includes the following stages: Stage 1: Collect and analyze resumes and personal information of international faculty through the resume analysis method. Resume analysis is a research method that analyzes the personal background, educational experience, work experience, academic achievements, social relations, and other information of the research object by recording the personal resume of the research object. In the stage of this study, the researcher firstly gathers basic information of the international faculty through a college website search. In the process of resume analysis, the researcher focuses on collecting and analyzing the teaching input of foreign teachers in their departments and colleges. The specific information and reference will be based on the detailed explanation of teaching input in the research question. Stage 2: Design interview outline and conduct pre-interviews with international faculty. The interview method collects information through face-to-face conversation between the researcher and the investigated, which has good flexibility and adaptability. In the second stage of the research, the researcher designs the interview outline and conducts the pre-interview with two international faculty based on the resume collection and analysis results of international faculty in the previous stage, so as to further improve the overall research design and the content of the interview outline. One interviewee is female and from Lebanon. She is now teaching at a foreign language university in China and has been teaching international finance, management, marketing and business report writing for six years at school of education. The pre-interview with her shows the differences on teaching input and influencing factors between international faculty and domestic faculty, and also guides the revision of interview design. Stage 3: Semi-structured interviews are conducted with international faculty and collect and analyze interview data. Researcher further adjusts the interview questions according to the pre-interview content and feedback. After the overall research design is further improved, the researcher formally sends interview invitations to 15 international faculty from one university, carries out formal semi-structured interviews, and collects interview data. After the interviews are conducted, the researcher collects data and analyzes the interview results, and refers to the relevant theoretical framework, answers all the research question of this research.

Based on the characteristics of the new era when the internationalisation of Chinese higher education is constantly advancing, this study focuses on the current situation of teaching input of international faculty in Chinese colleges and universities by taking the spirit and connotation of recent relevant national policy documents as the guidance and combining the new impact and challenges to international faculty in the COVID-19 era. The research object of this study includes 15 international faculty at S university, covering different gender, nationality, experience, field, title, etc. As one of the world-class university, S University has enjoyed a fame reputation worldwide and its international faculty team is relatively mature. In addition, S University includes schools with relatively large numbers of international faculty, such as Chinese-French joint institute, Chinese-American joint institute and foreign language school. Therefore, after the above sampling, this study intends to conduct semi-structured interviews with the sampled subjects. The study is conducted from the perspective of international faculty itself, and reflects the current situation and problems of teaching input of international faculty in some colleges and departments, so as to further promote the construction of international faculty teams and improve the management mechanism of schools and departments. At the same time, suggestions and inspirations on how to deeply integrate into the internationalisation process of global higher education and how to improve the quality of higher education are put forward from the persepectives of schools, colleges and international faculty itself.

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