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by Leslie Mertz
It's one thing to know how to send an e-mail or participate in videoconferencing, but quite another to use the technology to negotiate a business deal with a company overseas or to teach an exciting, interactive class from a remote location, according to Christine Miller, who has been working in this area of technology-mediated communication over the past ten years. "What I've really learned is that technology is a tool, but it's like any other tool. It's only as good as the skills of the person using it," she said.
Miller, a lecturer in the Department of Management at Wayne State University's School of Business Administration, has spent the last four years studying the successes and failures of technology-mediated communication through three unusual courses she offers, as well as an interdisciplinary research project.
She holds two of her courses -- U.S., Germany and European Union from a Business Perspective and U.S.-Japan Business Relations -- simultaneously on campus and at Wayne State's Oakland Center about 20 miles away. One class sees her in person and the other watches her by way of a live video link. "I rotate between the two locations, so I have a group of about 25 students in front of me, and then we connect to the remote class via this two-way interactive communication," she said. Both classes meet in specially equipped distance-learning classrooms that have received funding from the University's Student Technology Fee Development Program administered by the Office of the Vice President for Computing & Information Technology.
"Although learning to use the technology requires a bit of work, the real challenge comes in integrating the technology into the classroom experience," Miller said. "When we started using this distance-learning technology, I found that students were really put off. While they liked to come to class where it was convenient for them, they didn't like the idea of seeing themselves on a television screen. That's one of the first things we have to overcome in these classes." The classrooms are arranged with screens in front and in back that televise students in the other class. Miller operates the camera in her classroom, and a facilitator runs the camera at the remote site. When a student speaks, she or the facilitator zooms in enough to identify the speaker without closing in so much that the speaker is uncomfortable. To get the students' feet wet, Miller begins each of her courses by going around the room with the camera and asking the students to introduce themselves.
Beyond the initial camera shyness, Miller said the most difficult hurdle is engaging students in the remote classroom. "People are used to sitting in front of the TV at home as a passive activity. We're mesmerized," Miller said. "A class, however, must be interactive, and that is primarily the role and responsibility of the instructor." She has found some of the best ways to captivate students are fairly simple. "You have to make a personal connection across the tube by calling on students by name, zooming in when they have a question so you can see their faces, letting people know to speak up if they can't hear," she said. "These are the kinds of constant challenges you have to pursue aggressively and actively to make it an interactive experience."
To maintain student interest, she also found she had to limit her lecture time and her use of PowerPoint slides. (PowerPoint is software for creating presentations to project directly from a computer, essentially replacing traditional overhead transparencies.) "If I'm talking, flipping back and forth to slides, and I don't have some kind of interaction going, I can see eyes glazing over," she said. "I've found I have to interject things like asking questions, and getting a discussion going between the two sites. That's not easy to do even in a regular classroom, so it's many times more difficult to do over a TV screen."
One of her most successful techniques is the debate. "That's an interesting thing to do, because you have one debate team sitting at one location and the other team sitting at the other. I poll the students before and after the debate, and we calculate which side was more convincing and compelling to their student audiences at both sites," she explained. "They really become engaged."
In addition, students in both Miller's courses do their own team presentations, so they learn first-hand how to use the technology to the greatest benefit. The experience is significant for students in her graduate-level and upper-division courses, because technology-mediated communication is becoming more common in real-world businesses.
Her third course, Global Perspectives in Management, particularly focuses on these business uses of technology. WSU students develop mock business relationships with students from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and participate in an interactive business simulation. The TUM and WSU MBA students are divided into teams, and their task is to work through a business scenario taken from real-world, real-time happenings. For example, students recently worked through a scenario that shadowed the real-world purchase of a U.S. telecommunications firm by a large German corporation. Another scenario involved German and American firms in the automotive telematics industry.
The students use Blackboard, a Web-based eLearning system at Wayne State, to conduct their own chatrooms, participate in threaded discussions, electronically exchange documents, use LISTSERV lists for group e-mail, and create Web pages, Miller said. "Twice during this month-long simulation, the TUM and WSU students meet for a video conference, so they actually see each other thousands of miles away." These simulations help the students understand through direct experience the differences between face-to-face and technology-mediated business relationships.
"We do the simulation in English, so the German students are working with English as a second language. Some are very proficient, and some are not. Right away, the power shifts to those who can speak the best," Miller said. Attempts to use humor as an icebreaker almost universally failed. With language and cultural differences, she said, "That can be a disaster. But a threaded discussion to nominate your favorite beer was a great success as an introduction."
The WSU students also learned that people in other countries aren't as quick to attend to incoming communications. "Here, if you get an e-mail, you've got to open it, read it and respond," she said. Although the TUM students stayed on top of their e-mail, often people in Germany and other countries will consult with a superior or peer before responding. "They just don't have the same sense of urgency, so they may not answer for a while."
She added, "That's the beauty of this simulation. Although the scenario is fictitious, everything that happens is real. They really experience what it's like to be engaged in a negotiation or a project with somebody from another country." The WSU students also have the chance to compare face-to-face and technology-mediated communication through a study tour to Germany that includes a visit with their TUM counterparts. "One set of WSU-TUM teams could not reach any agreement at all through technology-mediated communication. They finally agreed they couldn't work together. When they saw each other in person, however, every single issue was ironed out in a few minutes," she said.
Miller, who is working toward her Ph.D. in business and anthropology, is also working on an interdisciplinary research project with Willie McKether, a Ph.D. student in anthropology, to explore technology-mediated communication in business. McKether is the assistant director of the Douglas A. Fraser Center for Workplace Issues at Wayne State.
"We're interested in this phenomenon of global virtual teams, which is a new form of work organization where team members are dispersed around the globe," Miller said. "These teams are separated by distance, time, culture and language, yet they have to complete work projects, and it is not easy. Technology is the least of their problems. It's the human interface that presents the greatest challenge."
The problems are compounded because the team members essentially go in blind. "People get thrown onto these teams, they have absolutely no training in how to succeed with technology-mediated communication, and the expectation is that they'll just intuitively know what to do. They don't," Miller said. "The result is that projects don't get done correctly, people get frustrated, deals get lost, and nobody really knows why. All they know is they don't like using this technology."
Miller and McKether's research project focuses on how global virtual teams establish trust with people they don't see face-to-face; how they put processes in place to make decisions, establish leadership or resolve conflict; and how they develop shared understanding to accomplish goals. They will base much of their work on detailed interviews with WSU and TUM students in the Global Perspectives in Management course.
"The University has a wonderful opportunity to make an impact here, because these global-team situations are becoming more commonplace," Miller said. "This technology is going to be here, and it's our job to figure out how to make it work for us. The potential is awesome."
Published by Wayne State University Computing & Information Technology
in the INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY @ wayne.edu Newsletter, Winter Term 2002
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