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The Internationalization Of Business And Management Education: Multimedia As A Response To The Demand For 'New European Managers'

Authors: Professor David TH Weir, Director, University of Bradford Management Centre, Robert McClements, Director of European Telematics Group, University of Bradford Management Centre, Dr Brian Gilding, Chairman of International Executive Programmes, University of Bradford Management Centre
First published: 1997

"Business schools that have made a success of the international approach have clearly thought out strategies of student recruitment, of staff selection and training, of programme content appropriate to an international mission, and of infra structural support for the courses."

'Internationalization' has become something of a 'motherhood' word in the present climate. Institutions tend to use it in their publicity material as if it was a touchstone of radical and useful practice in management education. But there are many different levels and types of internationalization and the extent to which it is, in practice, a beneficial element of management education in the UK is still to be determined. Multimedia courseware and support for distance learning which uses the Internet and video conferencing have strengthened the case for international programmes.

The early 1980s saw a flourish of theories of globalization, which coincided with a rapid growth in executive programmes with an international perspective. Some of these were based on the belief that executive education should be more explicitly directed to the creation of managers able to function in an increasingly international environment. Multi-skilled, multilingual and with transcontinental, if not cosmic, experience, these 'new European managers' were the hope of the future. Some of these excitable predictions have proved premature, but there has, nonetheless, been a steady, if less spectacular, development in the international aspects of business and management education. Bradford Management Centre has identified a pedagogy which takes advantage of the latest in IT and telecommunication to serve these developments.

There are several different types of internationalization including:

Many business schools are involved in schemes of student exchange. In Europe, among the countries of the European Community, the ERASMUS programme has created a major driving force promoting exchange programmes. For exchange students to benefit from this experience the programmes in which they are engaged need to be appropriate for them, and the subject matter relevant to their developmental needs. The exchange experience in itself will start to promote the international understanding claimed by the course planners, but much needs to be done subsequently to tailor the actual formation itself to the necessarily varying needs of an increasingly diverse student body. This may mean additional language preparations and additional classes, possibly with extra coaching and back-up support in terms of counselling in certain cases.
Some business schools recruit in overseas markets for their existing portfolio of programmes. University administrations are often enthusiastic about these ventures as they may permit the imposition of higher fees, and some business schools have specialized in overseas recruitment for overtly commercial reasons. Nonetheless, the majority of such associations are beneficial and some are long-standing. In the longer term, they lead to the growth of alumni networks in far-flung parts of the world, thus enhancing the international mission of the institution. As the graduates take their places in their own management cadres, their business careers can do much to support other networks of trade, finance and industry.
The international quality of the student body needs to be matched by the development of a truly international orientation among members of the faculty. In some business schools, regular exchange programmes, bringing full-time staff of business schools in other countries into mainstream taught programmes, are in operation.
Internationalization of programme content is quite well established. Increasingly, it may be based on research undertaken by the school itself, often over long periods. Some business schools may specialize in research in the Pacific Rim, in South East Asia, in Latin America and elsewhere. Students of business who aim to specialize in regions or areas not strongly represented in business school portfolios such as Latin America, should also consider universities with specialist research institutes in those areas which may support programmes in the business school, possibly associated with modern languages departments or in centres of regional expertise.
The internationalization of institutions is, in some ways, more developed than is the internationalization of programme content. Some programmes contain the opportunity of study abroad on a tailored programme, often provided by a partner institution.
Some UK business schools have institutionalized these offerings as part of their regular curriculum.
Some business schools have branch or off-shore installations. Sometimes these offer programmes under franchise from the mother institution. Some programmes are involved in summer school arrangements catering for students from more than one country.
Joint ventures, in which business schools in different countries offer programmes through bilateral arrangements, are increasingly common. Sometimes these are generalized into trilateral or multilateral programmes. In some, programme teaching is undertaken in several European locations and it is not possible to obtain the qualification without studying in at least two European countries and at least two European languages.
A number of schools offer to an international student body, programmes of international content taught by faculty drawn from several different nationalities.
Business schools with an international orientation will often have invested in supportive language training and have a dedicated language teaching facility with staff specialized in appropriate business languages. They may also have library materials originating in the relevant countries and specialist research groups with current projects, usually on a joint basis with overseas partners. The student body will include students at more than one level and stage from a range of overseas countries, and appropriate support facilities, including student welfare staff with research specialist experience. They may also have well established and live programmes of staff exchange. They will usually have a relative specialization in specific regions, rather than offering material about the world as a whole.

Multi-media and international delivery of programmes

Multi-media courseware has become the most effective means of delivering a consistent high quality of content - supported by Internet and ISDN connections which meld established 'best practice' with the demands of international business education.

Some eight years ago it became clear that, following the slimming down of management ranks in the 1980s, client companies were seeking a new approach to developing their executives entailing rather shorter periods of residential courses, together with some individual in-house or company-based work. Over the next four years the methods and techniques available for delivering the 'student centred' open learning at a distance were reviewed and focus groups were set up with the major clients. The clear conclusion to that study was that such methods were unsatisfactory, particularly for senior managers as students, for three reasons:

The learning material is static, in the sense that it was so expensive to create, and so expensive to update or modify, that updating did not occur and material soon became dated.
Interaction between the students and the material was programmed, in the sense that student questions had to be predicted and written into a familiar CBT framework.
The learning experience was a lonely one.

Senior managers and their companies found such a process unacceptable and therefore attempts to integrate residential learning with individual distance learning offered little chance of success.

In an attempt to develop an educational capability to include effective distance learning, a research and development project was launched in 1988. The result of that project is an educational process that can meet the three objections and can offer an effective integrated approach to executive development.

Any learning process involves the distribution of facts, interpretations and opinions from tutors to learners, opportunity for student learning through using the material, and interaction between student and tutor to extend and consolidate the learning. The original intention was to create a multi-media package, as it was then understood, to deliver the learning. The subsequent growth of communications technologies such as the WWW and ISDN have been absorbed into the project and are being built into the programme.

A particular strength of executive development is the close involvement of tutors, or facilitators, with the executives, and that is why residential courses are usually delivered to small groups of managers frequently by two or more tutors. In order to try and maintain this personal link it was decided to feature tutors and advisors in the multi-media learning material, with the same people involved in the various interactions between tutors and learners. The tutors involved soon realized that a rather different set of teaching skills was required for this type of work as opposed to traditional teaching and there was a certain amount of tutor resistance and anxiety. The recent advances in bandwidth now mean the course designer does not have to worry overmuch about how much data to include in the learning package. They can include whatever they think relevant, whether it is text, audio or video. One of the stages of the learning process in which multi-media may well be superior to lectures or paper-based materials is in the student's initial exposure to the subject, and now that technology has finally caught up with tutors' imaginations, and that students are more computer literate, we can expect to see this superiority made explicit and consolidated.

The updating of the teaching material implies that it is stored centrally in some way, and transmitted through the communication system. The centrally stored material could be updated at will, and recent, volatile information added whenever it appeared. That is still the longer term aim, but in this early stage we have set up a means of testing our ideas by storing the material on a CD and making the CD available to learners in the test situation.

So far two such 'course modules' have been created: an elementary Economics module and a Strategic Management Case Study based upon the remarkable success story of Hewlett Packard's experience in the UK in recent years. Other modules are currently in preparation, and the learning process is being tested using CDs in circumstances which closely model those which will soon be the norm in Executive Development and MBA work.

The most recent experience has been with the Hewlett Packard Case Study, and a brief description of that test will help to clarify the approach. The production of the case study CD owes a very great deal to the support of Hewlett Packard, and in particular Nick Earle, Hewlett Packard's European Marketing Director, Computer Systems Organization. All the information and analysis we needed was made available, and Nick Earle himself agreed to 'feature' in the CD. The case itself was 'written' by our specialist faculty and the head of that section also appears on the CD. The CD was in production over quite a long time, and more and more media were added as the project proceeded.

To test the effectiveness of the learning process the distance learning was simulated by asking our current MBA students to take part as follows.

The CD was made available to the students for unsupervised study. In the event, small groups of students worked through the material in about an hour or two. As with all case studies, there followed a plenary session - in this case the plenary was arranged in one of the normal teaching rooms with an internal tutor leading the session. The room was linked by video conferencing to Nick Earle's office in Bracknell, and he was able to observe the first part of the case discussion, after which the video conferencing signal of him was projected onto the large screen and he was able to take part in a further discussion session on the case. The video conferencing system used at Bradford was BT's VC8000 system, using PCC software suite, and relayed over ISDN2.

Of course, it is in fact the opinions of the learners that matters and a great deal of information and opinion from the students was collected, and is summarized below.

The main points from the evaluation were that the students were enthusiastic but thought the experience was 'different' from the traditional method. While they were reluctant to state a preference for either the CD or the traditional method, it was clear that they regarded reading from the screen as less comfortable, and possibly less efficient than reading from paper. Many showed that they are multi-media literate but that this knowledge has come from games or infotainment software: their knowledge of the capabilities of the technology clashed with what they perceive as important to their course of study, ie, they wanted more features but not too many to distract them. This line of thinking is shown in the enthusiasm for the method of assessment, a quiz. There was evidence of the quiz appealing to the competitive elements and of learners 'playing the system' - thinking more about the scoring algorithm than the subject matter. In summary, there were problems caused by learning styles and methods suited to traditional delivery being applied to new forms of technology based delivery. The interesting thing is that most of the students were aware of this discrepancy but unsure of how to cope with it. The discrepancy disappeared during the video conference because the quality of the input (and perhaps the fact that they were in a group once more) made the technology transparent.

The main lessons which have emerged are that the 'personalizing' of the material is important. Updating has not been an issue so far. Updating will become an issue and networking of some kind will be essential. Un-programmed interaction is vital.

The project is now being taken further in two respects. Much has been learned about creating or writing multi-media course material and there appears to be no reason why we should not now go on to write more modules, basing them on faculty expertise in various areas, built up by some 30 years of delivering Executive and MBA programmes. The Bradford Executive MBA is now being delivered in this country to a number of major clients and the application to those programmes is obvious. In addition, the Executive MBA is delivered in a number of different parts of the world and the prospect of communicating the multi-media learning to those countries is exciting.

The technology surrounding the learning modules, that is the methods of accessing the system and the ease with which the user can navigate about the material, is advancing all the time. Our progress in this respect owes much to the support given by British Telecom and, in fact, the Economics module was created with their generous allocation of funds and time.

It is our view that we are at the point where this whole development must now be accelerated and to that end we have founded our own European Telematics Group to focus our efforts.

The creation of personal development plans for delegates which help them to create a learning organization within their own company locks together with a modular and open programme structure. Focus of attention on the applied learning and company-based projects really does give the host organization an immediate payback.

The delivery of programmes using multi-media also means that the 'reflective practitioner?' has more time to reflect and practise in any international arena where distances can be telescoped and access to learning can be supported by innovations in the use of technology which are truly effective.