Above, clockwise from upper left: Dr. Brian Donnellan of NUI Galway, Professor Gino Sorcinelli of the Isenberg School, Murray Scott of NUI Galway, UMass Amherst senior Tom Zoltowski.
Share
Subscribe
From Isenberg to Ireland
Report from the virtual transatlantic classroom.
During the just-concluded academic year, students at the Isenberg School of Management traveled the old fashioned way to study in Ghana, Germany, Italy, Ireland, and China.
And for the first time, 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, Ireland. With financial support from Microsoft, Gino Sorcinelli, Director of Computer Resources at the Isenberg School, 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. The sophomore-level course—Introduction to Business Information Systems—used wireless networks that combined desktop PCs with handheld Tablet PCs—all combined in Sorcinelli’s course.
Course assignments also used a dedicated online course portal developed by Sorcinelli and UMass Amherst Du Bois Library Business Reference Librarian, Mike Davis, that gave students a nifty tool with which 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,” explains Sorcinelli. “The student teams assembled and analyzed 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 presentations. During their videoconferences, the students again used the 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 observed, 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.”
Brian Donnellan, lecturer and the course’s coordinator at NUI Galway, couldn’t agree more. “Many of our students will graduate into a work environment that employs global teams. They 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 from NUI Galway’s business information systems program travelled to Amherst to meet with Sorcinelli at the Isenberg School and 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 when you can confer virtually? “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 came here. With that said, there’s no denying the value of videoconferencing. We 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.”