In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, study abroad (SA) programs have undergone an urgent transfer to the online format. Although SA online has many merits toward sustainable international education in the post-COVID era, assuring the quality of these programs and sustaining students’ learning motivation have been key issues of concern. Moreover, there is still a lack of evidence derived from in-depth qualitative inquiries. To address these gaps, this study takes a close look at an individual’s story using a narrative approach to data analysis and employs an ecological perspective focusing on intentionality as the theoretical framework for exploring how the participant conquered the challenges when they transitioned to SA online. Successful plots identified include setting up the online learning environment, optimising the benefits of online learning, and sustaining students’ motivation to study. Several obstacles remained unsolved, such as the loss of interpersonal connection and empathy in online communication. This study concludes that the participant’s successful and unsuccessful encounters in enacting the affordances of online education were manifested by developed or undeveloped intentional actions as a result of individual-environment mutuality. Some implications are offered for constructing sustainable online SA environments that can diversify and innovate future international education experiences.

This study explores the fluidity of multilingual and intercultural identities among Australian university students participating in a study abroad (SA) program in China. It pilots a structured analytical framework to analyse visual metaphors created by the participants, examining how Chinese language learners depict their evolving identities, thereby uncovering their fluid nature. An analysis of three case studies of Australian students—one of Chinese heritage, one Australian-born of Serbian heritage, and one Japanese-born who moved to Australia in childhood—illustrates their unique trajectories of identity formation. Multimodal data reveals that while the visual metaphors of all three students point to fluidity, with sub-themes of dynamism, blending, and layeredness, the SA experience triggers diverse individual processes of identity negotiation and transformation. This study contributes to the fields of multilingual and intercultural education and SA through its innovative use of a visual metaphor analysis approach, which effectively captures and decodes the complexities of intercultural development among language learners in an SA environment. The study advocates visual metaphor as a valuable tool for both researching and understanding how multilinguals, especially those whose first and home language is not English, reflect on their multilingual and intercultural identity and experiences.