Going international without going international: multinational virtual teams

摘要

This case study of a multinational virtual team project tells how students have collaborated to write a paper in country dyads. Spanning our experience over five semesters, the paper shows how students can participate in an actual cross-cultural learning alliance within the normal curriculum. In this project, students are partnered with students from another country and jointly analyze the marketing of a product in the two countries. Communicating by E-mail and the Web, they work together in virtual teams to complete this task. Analyzing the benefits-and the problems-such collaborative efforts present for our students, we offer suggestions for professors who might like to design and administer a similar project. We find that the effectiveness of such projects is dependent on the professor/instructor's ability to help students overcome barriers to successful intercultural communications, not on mastery of technology.