Prepared for the symposium, "E-MAIL, the WEB, and MOOs: Developing the Writing Skills of University Students in Cyberspace," George Washington University, February 8, 1997
An earlier draft of this paper was prepared for the 1994-1995 Junior Faculty Development Program Conference: Russian Educational Reform, Syracuse University, May 3-7, 1995
In two experiments in international education groups of management students in two countries worked together on semester projects. The two sides communicated with each other via email. The task assigned to the students was to develop a business plan for a joint venture between American and Russian companies or to make as much progress toward this goal as possible in one semester. Although no businesses were established, these projects were successful from an educational point of view. The students learned about business operations in a different country through direct interaction with their counterparts. The experiments suggest that the current availability of electronic messaging to people in universities and the use of this technology to coordinate student group projects in two or more countries may lead to a new role for universities. The new role is facilitation of the formation of joint ventures among small and medium sized businesses.
The use of modern telecommunication technologies for educational purposes is currently developing quite rapidly. As such technologies spread around the world, new opportunities are emerging to internationalize educational activities. This paper describes two experiments to use email between students in management courses at our institutions in Moscow and Washington, DC. The purpose of the experiments was to determine how working on a common project with students in a different country could enhance the learning experiences of management students. Email was used as the medium of communication. All communication between Russian and American students was conducted in English. The American students who participated in these projects were enrolled in a course in Cross-Cultural Management. Students in this class were required to form into multi-cultural groups and to work together on a project. The projects were regarded as the laboratory part of the course. Because about half of the students enrolled in the MBA program at George Washington University are from other countries, the term "American students" actually means a multinational group of students.
In the first experiment, conducted in the spring of 1993, a group of American students and a group of Russian students volunteered to participate in a project which was aimed at creating one or more joint business ventures. In the second experiment, conducted in the spring of 1994, a group of American students communicated with a Russian professor who proposed a specific business opportunity -- translating and then selling American management training videos in Russia.
The major educational goals of these two exercises were to give the students the opportunity to experience cross-cultural communication; to provide some initial training in establishing business contacts with foreign partners; and to acquaint the students with the use of email for regular communication.
From the beginning of the first experiment it was clear that the main constraint would be the limited access of the Russian group to email. The Russian students had to rely on the single email address which belonged to a research institution and which was also used by about 50 other researchers. There was no local computer network, so the only way to send or receive messages was to bring messages prepared in advance on a floppy disk. Time delays, which occurred because of this physical movement of files in Moscow, turned out to be the major obstacle to the success of the project. It took an average of about two weeks to exchange messages. Since both groups were involved in one semester courses, it became apparent very soon that substantial progress on defining one or more joint ventures would not be possible in such a short period of time.
One reason that time was limited was the different university schedules. For the Moscow Institute the semester runs from mid February to late June. For George Washington University the semester runs from mid January to early May. So there were less than three months overlap in the semesters.
Delays and transmission problems limited communication between the two sides. In both examples it quickly became clear that physical barriers would be more significant than cultural ones. The American students made an interesting point. "Although we did not experience a true 'cultural gap,' we felt that the physical barriers could be considered cultural barriers because the infrastructure was viewed as critically poor from our subjective perspective." (Kim, et al., 1993)
The American students expressed surprise at how well the Russian students wrote in English. However, they also said, "...the interpretation of the messages sometimes presented problems due to the fact that Russian and English are very different languages." (Chen, et al., 1994)
The first project was not aimed at a predetermined goal. Instead, the goal was to conduct an exchange of ideas about business opportunities in Russia and the U.S. and to discuss joint venture possibilities. The students, about five on each side, sought to identify ventures with interest on both sides.
The U.S. side suggested several projects:
The Russian side suggested:
The students from each side made a preliminary analysis of the market potential of these ideas and rejected some of them. For example, the American group rejected the memorabilia project because of logistical problems. "The brokering of memorabilia requires an expert appraiser and the supply of this type of item would be very sporadic." The idea of "magician" toys was turned down for cultural reasons. The American students expressed the view that American children are primarily interested in "Teen-age Mutant Ninja Turtles" or G.I. Joe dolls rather than toys that are intended to "develop thinking," as the Russian students put it.
When we started this exercise, we did not expect that the project would bring immediate practical results. However, the primary goal of experiencing cross-cultural business communication was achieved to a substantial degree. Several of the students continued to communicate after the end of the semester.
The second experiment was of a different kind. American students, conducting a group project for a course in cross-cultural management, communicated with a Russian professor who set as the goal of the project the search for a possible partner in the U.S. who would be interested in establishing a long term relationship with a Russian partner in order to translate and adapt U.S. educational videos for the emerging Russian market for training in business and management.
From the Russian side the students received information about the present situation regarding demand for such materials, economic constraints on such a project, possible business partners, and forms of cooperation with the US side. The Russian firm suggested that they would translate the tapes from English into Russian and dub the tapes or provide subtitles. The Russian firm would also change the technical standard from NTSC, used in the US, to SECAM, used in Europe. The Russian firm would become a distributor of these tapes in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries.
Based on this information, the American students wrote a business proposal for the US companies that produce educational videos. After receiving initial responses, the students contacted by telephone those companies who expressed interest and conducted preliminary negotiations. Throughout this process they regularly contacted the Russian professor by email to obtain additional information and to report on progress. As a result of these efforts they obtained the names and addresses of three US companies which expressed strong interest for further negotiations with the Russian side.
This project also did not result in a joint venture. The American copyright holders were concerned about the status of intellectual property legislation and enforcement in Russia and other Newly Independent States. Nevertheless the project was successful from an educational point of view.
Regarding the obstacles to establishing successful joint ventures, the two experiments revealed cultural, technical, and legal or economic difficulties. Some of the difficulties can be rather easily overcome. Some will be resolved only as new institutions or ways of doing business are developed.
These experiments in international educational activities showed that international email can be an effective tool in teaching courses with an international focus. The greatest obstacle for such projects still is the very limited access by Russian educators and students to modern communication facilities. Of course this situation is gradually changing, but more slowly than we would like. The development of electronic links among American and Russian students and professors would be facilitated by focusing technical assistance in the education field on disseminating the needed technologies among educational institutions and on sharing American experiences in distance learning and interactive methods of education with Russian teachers and professors.
These two experiments lead us to believe that there may be an emerging new role for business schools in the global economy. Management schools could become an important link for communication between American and Russian businesses, especially small and medium-sized companies. The American students were impressed that communication via academic networks was much easier than via telephone or fax. Although there were other methods of communication available, email was the most convenient method because of the low cost of communication and because of existing access to the necessary equipment. Email was also the most efficient means of communicating because of the time difference (eight hours) between Russia and the U.S. Because it is available at all hours, email can be used at any time, unlike the telephone. Email is cheaper than communicating by fax. (Chen et al., 1994)
Not later than 1993 one hundred percent of universities in the U.S. had campus computer networks. Presently American universities have the highest rates of usage for all internet applications. Email and its companion, file transfer, have become an everyday practice throughout higher education in the U.S. (Cotton, 1995)
Business people in America, not to mention Russia, especially those in small and medium-sized companies are much less aware of the advantages of this type of communication and in many cases do not have trained people who are plugged into "cyberspace." We believe that a growing role for business and management professors and students may be to help establish links via email among small businesses in different countries.
Establishing initial, reliable communications through email networks available to educational institutions is important, but not the only requirement for a new joint venture to be successful. Usually educators who can provide such linkages have already been cooperating for several years. Hence, they can also serve as consultants and as mediators assisting entrepreneurs in overcoming language and cultural barriers.
Here are some examples of such "barriers" from the projects described in this paper. The American students soon realized that the American approach of simply proposing a joint venture was too impersonal for the Russian students. The Russian students wanted to establish personal contacts with the American group. This was very important to the Russian students -- to get to know their American counterparts on a personal level, and to establish some sort of connection or find something in common, before arranging a joint venture. In traditional American fashion, the American group initially focused its energies on gathering information and getting organized rather than trying to establish relationships with the Russian students. The American students wrote, "This proved to be costly in terms of time and effort because ultimately our proposals had little chance of being successfully implemented, due to our incorrect assumptions. Our group realized that this project taught us more about the barriers to setting up ventures rather than the actual implementation and operation of joint ventures." (Kim et al., 1993)
Sometimes there is out-of-date and even false information about one country circulating in another country. For example, from an article some of the American students learned, "The term 'depreciation' does not exist in the Soviet Union. Russians think that they should try to conserve assets for as long as possible and do not understand why an asset would be written off in five years." That information was entirely wrong for the Soviet Union, and is certainly not true about Russia today.
Summarizing the results of the experiments we can say the following: