University Image Building via We Chat During the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of a Chinese Higher Education Institution

ABSTRACT

The contagious nature of the Covid-19 coronavirus has seriously challenged universities all over the world, as millions of students have been unable to attend classes on campus. For universities such as BNU-HKBU United International College (UIC), given the loss of face-to-face communication channels, social media such as UIC WeChat Account have been playing an important role in connecting students, parents and the university, and in displaying the university's image. The shift toward the use of social media during the Covid-19 pandemic has drawn our attention to the fact that most scholarly discussion of university image building has been from the perspective of tertiary institution management, while little attention has been given to the multimodal resources employed in WeChat posts during the image building process. This study thus focuses on an investigation, from a multimodal perspective, of image building of UIC, a higher education institution with English as the medium of instruction in China, during the Covid-19 pandemic. The study was conducted by drawing on the theoretical framework of the Corporate Identity system (CIS) which includes the Mind Identity System (MIS), Behavior Identity System (BIS) and Visual Identity System (VIS). From a bottom-up approach, in the first place, posts published by UIC from the outbreak of the pandemic were collected to build a small corpus. Then texts and pictures were categorized and analyzed to find out how different components and modes work together to form the BIS and VIS, and what MIS of UIC has been demonstrated. The study shows how multimodal resources on social media have supported the development of a university image in a time of crisis and social distancing. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021.