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This paper reports the motivations of middle-class Asian students who choose German universities of applied sciences under the third wave of international student mobility. It aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the students’ qualitative experiences in Asian countries that influenced their preference for German universities of applied sciences and their expectations of their German degree as cultural capital. The research analyzes the family, school, peer experiences of 23 Asian students currently enrolled in a German university of applied sciences to understand their motivations for choosing this type of institution and Germany. The findings reveal that the cultural capital that influenced their choice includes differentiation strategies of middle-class students, reasonable education investment choices of Asian students, and the use of a German degree as a trump card in the labor market. The study provides implications for the development of international higher education by connecting Asian students’ aspirations for global cultural capital to a complex and atypical structure that encompasses global, national, and individual dimensions simultaneously.

The study presents qualitative research on university students' online learning experience process at the higher education level. It used a grounded theory through semi-structured in-depth interviews with 25 university students for framing and structuring the paradigm model of university students' online learning experiences. A paradigm model illustrating this developmental process is presented, which includes the casual and contextual conditions that caused and evolved the central phenomenon for their online learning, the strategies used by the students to overcome external/internal disturbances in continuing their learning process, the conditions that helped/hindered those strategies, and the consequences. Finally, the following meaning units were discovered through the preceding paradigm model. The students started learning with a negative impression of unfamiliar learning methods such as online learning, but over time, they improved their self-management abilities and gained a broader understanding of self-discipline. In the midst of this, competence in digital literacy according to generational differences was also discovered as one of the factors affecting learning, forming a virtual community, and increasing personal learning through online interaction. Finally, the implications of the overall learning ecology for the future role of online learning were also considered. Based on this analysis of students' online learning experiences, the direction for online learning was suggested.