Communicating COVID-19: Analyzing Higher Education Institutional Responses in Canada, China, and the USA.

The study aims to examine how higher education institutions (HEIs) in three countries responded to the challenges of COVID-19 over a six-month period at the outbreak of the global pandemic. Employing document analysis, we examined 732 publicly available communications from 27 HEIs in Canada, China, and the USA. Through theoretical frameworks of crisis management and Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), we explore how HEIs respond to the pandemic and protect campus stakeholders.