Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/58063
"Dan and I didn't give the students any direction about how they should work within their groups. Sometimes students have to experience the wrong way on their own. Humans learn best from their failures." —Robert Franz, Fachhochschule Brandenburg, Germany The first 3C project was unrolled in the fall of 2005. The opening weeks of class were devoted to learning about enter- prise software, business processes, workflows, and collabora- tion. Students worked in three- and four-person teams to found their companies, map their processes, and make those processes more efficient. "We wanted them to map out processes in a way so that disruption meant some things would have to change," says Conway. "Students would have to evaluate, first, if the pro- cesses needed to be changed and, second, if the processes could be modified or if they had to be thrown out so stu- dents could come up with new processes entirely." About eight weeks into the semester, Franz and Conway mocked up an online Financial Times page that announced a merger between the U.S. and German companies. On a Saturday, students in both classes were e-mailed the link to the "leaked" newspaper article. Then both professors refused to answer e-mail over the weekend. When nervous students arrived in class on Monday, they learned the details of their merger. Not only did they have to deal with language and time zone barriers to work with their new teams, they also had to find their own Web-based collaborative software solutions for sharing files and building PowerPoint slides over the Internet. While SAP software was available, students were allowed to choose whatever tools they thought might work best for them. But technology was only one challenge students met as they raced through the rest of the semester. Lessons Learned Some of the greatest obstacles students faced in the 3C class revolved around very human issues. For instance, cultural differences were strikingly illustrated as students discovered that not every nation shares the same holiday schedule. "Most American students just left school over Thanks- giving, not realizing that their German counterparts didn't know about this special holiday and were waiting for ongoing communication," says Franz. Some of the German students believed the Americans had simply quit. When the Ameri- cans eventually returned from the break, not much time was left before they had to make their joint video presentations. Students also had to bounce back from a certain resent- ment at having the rug pulled out from under them. "They had worked very hard on their presentations, then all of a sudden everything changed, and they were really put off by that," says Conway. "But that's the context of global busi- ness. Things happen beyond your control, and then you've got to change." 36 BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2007 Several groups struggled more than others with language and time zone differences, and none of the students tapped into lessons they'd recently learned in project management courses. "Dan and I didn't give the students any direction about how they should work within their groups, but we were quite shocked that not a single team made a project plan or used a project management tool," says Franz. "Sometimes students have to experience the wrong way on their own. Humans learn best from their failures." In the end, all the teams succeeded magnificently. At the close of the semester, Conway convened a panel in Indiana to judge the students' PowerPoint presentations. Present were executives from SAP, John Deere, BP Products North America, and General Mills—all of whom are constantly A for Effort How does a professor grade the work of student teams when half the members are across the ocean—in a class- room at another university? "The evaluation process has to be nontraditional," admits Dan Conway of Indiana University's Kelley School. For his students, the grade is composed of a number of elements, including fairly standard tests and essays administered during the first half of the course. Before the merger, the teams keep close track of their mapping and procurement processes, creating a document of their efforts that Conway also considers when determining a grade. This document later is swapped with teams at Fachhochschule Brandenburg for informational purposes. During the second half of the program, students are graded partially on how well they collaborate. Students keep a diary to track how often their teams meet, what technology they use, and how much each student con- tributes, and this diary is also used during the evaluation process. For the 2006 class, students in Germany and the U.S. all used SAP's NetWeaver integration and appli- cation platform, which made it easier for the teachers to monitor the efforts of individuals and also created more uniformity among the teams. The final grading component falls into place during the students' video presentation, given before a panel of integration experts. "The panel rates the teams on content and presentation quality, and I take my lead from them," Conway says.