Report from the Virtual Transatlantic Classroom
During the just-concluded academic year, business school students traveled overseas in Isenberg School visits to Ghana, Germany, Italy, Ireland, and China. Students participated in a virtual international experience as well: a real-time, online classroom with students from the National University of Ireland (NUI) in Galway. With financial support from Microsoft, the course’s creator, Isenberg School Director of Computer Resources Gino Sorcinelli, coordinated videoconferencing and other technologies, which allowed student teams from both universities to join forces in shared research projects. In each project, a transatlantic student team of six assigned, evaluated, and ultimately presented research—all in real time. For its real-time transatlantic interactions, the sophomore-level course—Introduction to Business Information Systems—employed Microsoft ConferenceXP, a platform of technologies that works in wireless networks, delivers videoconferencing capabilities from desktop PCs, and interfaces with Tablet PCs—all three of which Sorcinelli incorporated into his course.
The assignments also employed a dedicated online course portal developed by Sorcinelli and UMass Amherst Dubois Library Business Reference Librarian, Mike Davis. The portal, which has been central to Sorcinelli’s introductory course (and several others, including introductory business statistics, accounting, and business law) for two years, offers students shared and individual assignment and work space, and allows for the use of computer applications like Microsoft Office Suite and QlikView, a nifty analytical tool that allows students to analyze data sets and spread sheets with exceptional speed and graphical clarity. The portal also makes available a dazzling array of electronic data bases, including, among others, Gale’s Business & Company Resource Center, Lexis/Nexis, ABI/INFORM Global, and Mergent Online.
“Each student team focused on a different company; most of them—Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Verizon, for example—were in the IT or communications fields,” explained Sorcinelli. “The student teams used the portal to assemble and analyze historical and strategic information about the companies,” he continued. “Each team decided as a group which historical events, financial indicators, and company strategies to include in their analytical summaries and PowerPoint presentations. During their videoconferences, the students also employed Tablet PCs, which allowed them to instantly transfer and electronically annotate work in progress.
“Videoconferencing allowed for a rich exchange of ideas, but we needed email exchanges as well to clarify and organize our work,” observed sophomore Chad Rubin, whose team of three American and three Irish students focused on Hewlett Packard and the forced exit of its former chief executive officer, Carly Fiorina. “We Americans seemed a bit more informal than our Irish counterparts; at times, we were a little slower to get down to business,” noted Marie Chinappi, a member of Rubin’s team. Irish and American dialects and idioms, she continued, also slowed the pace of conversation—a bit ironic, considering the breathtaking speed of videoconferencing. “But that gave us practice in mediating across the two cultures, which was certainly one of the points of the exercise.”
Standing: Dr. Brian Donnellan of NUI
Galway and Prof. Gino Sorcinelli of
the Isenberg School; Seated: Senior
Isenberg student Tom Zoltowski and
Murray Scott of NUI Galway.
Brian Donnellan, lecturer and the course’s coordinator at NUI Galway, couldn’t agree more. “Recent meetings with our industry advisory board, which includes representatives from leading IT firms like IBM, Dell, and Microsoft, have emphasized that many of our students will graduate into a work environment that employs globally distributed teams. After graduating, our former students will step right into virtual global team meetings where they’ll need to align communication and decision making. We want them to establish a comfort level as students so they can hit the ground running as professionals.”
In May, Donnellan and two other colleagues—Murray Scott and Jacqueline Rowland-- from NUI Galway’s business information systems program met with Sorcinelli at the Isenberg School to plan the next phase of the course’s development. “This semester got us off to a great start, but future student collaborations will move closer to real world business problem solving,” he observed. “That means introducing business casework that requires teams to evaluate alternatives. Just as in business itself, students will use videoconferencing to debate different choices and ultimately to arrive at decisions as a group.”
But why travel to the US to meet with Sorcinelli when you can confer on ConferenceXP? “As effective as videoconferencing can be, I won’t pretend that it captures all of the richness of in-person communication,” remarked Sorcinelli. “Body language and other nonverbal nuances are more readable in person. And there’s nothing like meeting in person for building trusting, lasting relationships. That’s why our colleagues from NUI Galway are here. With that said, there’s no denying the value of videoconferencing. We’ve had productive video conversations and emails with our Irish colleagues before their visit and we’ll continue to do so in the months ahead. For the faculty, our students, and business itself, videoconferencing has been productive and cost effective. It’s become, in fact, another element in my course that’s part of my definition of computer literacy.”
