Building a Shared Virtual Learning Culture

Abstract

Business professionals increasingly use digital tools to collaborate across multiple cultures, locations, and time zones. Success in this complex environment depends on a shared culture that facilitates the making of knowledge and the best contributions of all team members. To prepare managers for such communication, the authors designed and implemented a semester-long intercultural virtual team project between a management communication course in the United States and one in Canada. To prevent faultlines between subgroups on each campus, the authors set a clear outcome for students’ research, established equity between the two sites, structured assignments so that students worked interdependently across sites”, and encouraged inclusive communication. Faculty considering such a partnership should incorporate a robust collaborative workspace, incorporate preliminary exercises before a large project, provide intensive mentoring and instruction on peer review, arrange for a real visit or videoconference between locations, and expect the project to be both fun and demanding.

Building Intercultural Competence Through Virtual Team Collaboration Across Global Classrooms

“…Moreover, by engaging in a cross-cultural virtual collaboration, students facilitated work with counterparts from different cultural backgrounds, communication styles, and expectations. Similar to the learning outcomes of previous GNLEs (Starke-Meyerring & Andrews, 2006), developing students' intercultural sensitivity and intercultural communication competence was an essential objective in the outcome of this project.…”

Managing Complexity: A Technical Communication Translation Case Study in Multilateral International Collaboration

“…Attempts to set up international collaborations between student groups from different countries have a long, growing history (Anderson, Bergman, Bradley, Gustafsson, & Matzke, 2010;Du-Babcock & Varner, 2008;Fitch, Kirby, & Greathouse Amador, 2008;Herrington, 2005Herrington, , 2008Herrington & Tretyakov, 2005;Kennon, 2008;Klein & La Berge, 2012;Moreno-Lopez, 2004;Stärke-Meyerring & Andrews, 2006;Thompson & Carter, 1973). An increasing body of research has demonstrated the benefits of having students learn international professional communication by working in CCVTs, linked through the Internet (Flammia, 2005(Flammia, , 2012Flammia, Cleary, & Slattery, 2010;Gerritsen & Verckens, 2006;Goby, 2007;Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999;Stärke-Meyerring, Duin, & Palvetzian, 2007).…”

Do International Online Collaborative Learning Projects Impact Ethnocentrism?

“…Within this framework of goals, assignments, and tools, it was our hope that students would 'achieve the kind of transformative learning that results from inquiring into, questioning, and negotiating these diverse ways of knowing and from building shared learning and knowledge cultures across traditional boundaries' (Starke-Meyerring & Wilson, 2008, p. 21), having the impact described in the GNLE research (Starke-Meyerring & Andrews, 2006) and in the cultural psychology literature (Kitayama & Cohen, 2007).…”