Challenges Faced by Jesuit Worldwide Learning Students: Piloting a Mixed Methods Investigation.

In 2018-2019, Creighton University, a Jesuit university in Omaha, Nebraska, piloted a scholarship program in which a few graduates of the Diploma program living in Afghanistan and Jordan matriculated at Creighton University in its online B.S. in Leadership Studies. These students were enrolled in courses along with nontraditional adult students, and challenges on the part of the students, the faculty, and staff arose. The goal of the exploratory study on which this paper is based has been to explore the usefulness of a specific methodology, Group Concept Mapping (GCM), through its online platform, Group Wisdom (GW), combined with the analysis of narrative course evaluations and interview texts adopting the Grounded Theory approach using a text analysis software (Open Code 4.03) to identify the specific challenges of students, staff, and educators in this program so that they could be addressed. The authors conclude, based on this pilot study, that the use of this combined and integrated methodology is effective to examine challenges that students living at the margins face when pursuing higher education degrees. They propose a larger study using this approach in order to generate the empirical evidence that informs strategies to address these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]