Problems Students Face in Foreign Universities

This report discusses the challenges faced by students studying in foreign universities and how MediaWiki can help them. It covers academic, language, and demographic challenges, as well as student-teacher interaction. Real-life examples are provided to showcase the benefits of using MediaWiki.

Running Head:PROBLEMS STUDENTS FACE IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES
PROBLEMS STUDENTS FACE IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1PROBLEMS STUDENTS FACE IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES
Executive Summary
This report aims at understanding the problems that students face when they travel overseas
to university for education purpose. This report also focuses on how students study at
university can get help from MediaWiki. The report also provides some real-life examples at
how using MediaWiki can provide help to these students.

2PROBLEMS STUDENTS FACE IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Discussion..................................................................................................................................3
Academic challenges-.............................................................................................................3
English proficiency-...............................................................................................................4
Demographic challenges-.......................................................................................................4
Student -teacher interaction-...................................................................................................5
Project Scenarios....................................................................................................................5
Case Study-1.......................................................................................................................5
Solution provided by Mediawiki........................................................................................6
Case Study-2.......................................................................................................................6
Solution provided by Mediawiki........................................................................................6
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................6
References..................................................................................................................................7

3PROBLEMS STUDENTS FACE IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES
Introduction
MediaWiki can uniquely be defined as a free and an open-source wiki engine.
MediaWiki was developed by Wikimedia Foundation and MediaWiki volunteers. The coding
related to MediaWiki was written using PHP language. MediaWiki has proved to be helpful
and advantageous to overseas students in numerous cases. MediaWiki has helped students to
learn uniquely from web-based environments, helped students in joint problem-solving,
building up knowledge and sharing as well. It has helped learners to collaborate, critically
reflect and even build consensus which is similar to face-to-face learning environments.
Students in universities also get access to web-based tools to promote learning in a
constructively fashion.

4PROBLEMS STUDENTS FACE IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES
Discussion
Knowledge Management Problems faced by overseas students
Academic challenges-
Learning difficulty in foreign language prove to be the most common academic issue
that international students face. Moreover,the students are not familiar with the host country’s
pattern of learning, particularly with the academic practices (Middlemas and Peat 2015).
Overseas students who are not familiar with the teaching style of the host institution they
experience numerous problems regarding learning structure. In addition to this international
student face more pressure to achieve academic success, as failure has more significant
consequences in overseas students. Addition to this those students who are getting
scholarships from their own countries might lose scholarships permanently if the academic
performance of the students are poor. At the same time, overseas students studying in abroad,
at their own expenses may have to provide extra expenses intuitions, in that case to extend
their studies because of their academic failure (Akanwa 2015). These are the major problems
or rather challenges that overseas students face regarding their academic in foreign
university.
English proficiency-
According to various research, the result comes out that language barriers in
academic and social settings are problems that overseas students faces who have lower
proficiency in English language (Lim and Pham 2016). In academics lives, language barrier
reduces overseas students abilily to understand lectures provided by the lecturers, actively
they are unable to connect with class discussions and fail to complete assignments due to
communication barrier. Ultimately these barriers result in student failure. In terms of social
lives, language and barrier give a negative impact on students adjustment culturally.
Language problem can also cause physiological problems. Physiological problems include

5PROBLEMS STUDENTS FACE IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES
social isolation, loneliness and depression-related problems(Laxström and Kanner 2015). So,
these are certain drawback that overseas student faces with English proficiency related to
their studying in foreign universities.
Demographic challenges-
Demographic prospects add a new dimension of higher education pressure. It is a
surprising factor that is addressed rarely in a higher education policy area. Higher education
is quickly becoming a universal aspiration. As a result, according to the survey, the student
number will almost become double to reach 160 million within 2025 (Alexopoulos and
Αλεξόπουλος, 2016).The demographic trends have far-reaching implications in higher
educations. Demographic trends transform higher education systems in future. Demographic
challenges have proved to be a major challenge for students who are studying in abroad for
their higher education. As the growth of population is immense and huge number of students
aspire to study abroad so it has proved to be a great challenge for government as well arrange
for scholarship problems for all the aspiring students, as a result the government has to
compromise with quality due to increase in quantity. These are certain demographic
challenges that overseas students faces.
Student -teacher interaction-
Understanding the needs of the students is important, but this turns out to be difficult
for overseas students as they find it difficult to interact with the teachers due to numerous
factors such as communication problems, minority issue and many more (Alfaki 2015). The
students find it difficult to ask questions to teachers related to their academic doubts. The
students face further problems in reviewing their assignments with the teachers due to the
problems mentioned above. They develop a kind of fear regarding the academic factors due
which they fail to perform well in their subjects. MediaWiki has proved to be a boon for these
students as with the help of MediaWiki tutor gives reviews in student’s performance

6PROBLEMS STUDENTS FACE IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES
individually and by this the tutor also receives great help in monitoring every student’s
performance individually and guide the students according to their merit to perform well in
academics.
Project Scenarios
The difficulty faced by overseas students was related to interaction and communication
barrier. This hampered student’s academic performance and individualism.
Case Study-1
Students mentioned their concern related to discussions. Professors provided group
discussions in class. Classmates usually did not invite the students to join in their group
discussions.
Solution provided by Mediawiki
Participation in online discussions has provided help to students regarding their learning
pattern. Reviews of the lecturer in student’s essay have provided great help to improve
student’s academic performance (Lampa et al. 2017).
Case Study-2
Students mentioned their problems related to communication barrier. The student faced
difficulty in rate of speech and communication (Mojžiš et al. 2017). The student faced
difficulty in English conversation was very the US which was difficult for him to understand.
Solution provided by Mediawiki
Using MediaWiki has changed the way students learn the language . Mediawiki helped
students to connect and interact with other students which have provided great help to
develop their communication skill and eliminate communication- related barrier (Koehler and
Ertmer 2016).
Conclusion
In this report the discussion was related to the issues that student faces while studying
in foreign universities away from their country culture. They face various challenges related

7PROBLEMS STUDENTS FACE IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES
to demographic, academic, language and interaction with teachers. As a result they fail to
achieve academic success and students face problems such as depression, anxiety and many
more related to this. This report focuses on giving a solution to all these challenges with the
help of an open source platform known as MediaWiki which can help the students to achieve
academic success in foreign universities. The real-life examples that are provided at the end
of the discussion of this report proves the fact that MediaWiki has provided great help to the
overseas students studying in foreign universities.

8PROBLEMS STUDENTS FACE IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES
References
Akanwa, E.E., 2015. International students in western developed countries: History,
challenges, and prospects. Journal of International Students, 5(3), pp.271-284.
Alfaki, I.M., 2015. University students’ English writing problems: diagnosis and
remedy. International Journal of English Language Teaching, 3(3), pp.40-52.
Koehler, A.A. and Ertmer, P.A., 2016. Using Web 2.0 tools to facilitate case-based
instruction: Considering the possibilities. Educational Technology, pp.3-13.
Lampa, S., Willighagen, E., Kohonen, P., King, A., Vrandečić, D., Grafström, R. and Spjuth,
O., 2017. RDFIO: extending Semantic MediaWiki for interoperable biomedical data
management. Journal of biomedical semantics, 8(1), p.35.
Laxström, N. and Kanner, A., 2015, June. Multilingual Semantic MediaWiki for Finno-Ugric
dictionaries. In Septentrio Conference Series (No. 2, pp. 75-86).
Lim, S.S. and Pham, B., 2016. ‘If you are a foreigner in a foreign country, you stick
together’: Technologically mediated communication and acculturation of migrant
students. New Media & Society, 18(10), pp.2171-2188.
Middlemas, B. and Peat, J., 2015. Virtual Internationalisation’and the Undergraduate
Curriculum in UK and Overseas Universities. Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic
Practice, 3(3).
Mojžiš, J., Balogh, Š., Ásványi, M. and Budinská, I., 2017, September. Collaborative
Learning Supported with Mediawiki Platform in Technical University Environment.
In International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (pp. 660-665). Springer,
Cham.

9PROBLEMS STUDENTS FACE IN FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES