FOR RELEASE: March 12, 1999
Contact: Linda Myers Office: (607) 255-4206Home: (607) 277-5035 [email protected] Compuserve: Bill Steele, 72650,565 http://www.news.cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Professor George Milkovich's global classroom is truly something new and different. Milkovich has been on the faculty of Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations for 20 years and is one of the world's most-respected authorities on international human resource management -- developing strategies to help global companies hire and retain the best people. What makes this year's International HR Management course unusual for him is that of the 95 graduate HR and business students enrolled, only 20 are on Cornell's campus. The rest are in Shanghai, Caracas and Ljubljana, a major city in Slovenia. What's more, a quarter of them are not full-time students, but human resource executives at General Motors and nine other supporting companies.
While Cornell is considered at the forefront of distance learning, with a major investment in cutting-edge infrastructure, 35 courses under way and another 80 in development, it is only one of many universities involved in offsite education. Milkovich's course, however, is the only one anywhere that spans four continents, links all participants synchronously -- at the same time -- and has the benefit of an executive education component.
The amphitheater-shaped classroom where Milkovich runs the course has three oversized screens that, in addition to displaying PowerPoint slides, show live, high-resolution views of the Chinese, Venezuelan and Slovenian students in their respective classrooms. Those students, in turn, have clear, real-time views of their Cornell classmates as they discuss the same assignments and present reports together.
The classroom in Slovenia doesn't look much different from the classrooms in Venezuela or China. Each is outfitted with desks arranged in a pattern and each is filled with students mostly in jeans and sweaters, some eager, some shy, listening, taking notes, commenting on the lesson and asking questions of their classmates. Put them together,
however, and you have a rare mix -- possibly the ideal mix to solve such global HR problems as how to give an honest job performance evaluation in a country where it's considered impolite to criticize. Or how to hire employees who will fit into a company's culture when it's different from the host country's culture. Or how to reward good job performance in a region beset by double-digit inflation. Or most important, whether globally organized enterprises outperform those organized only domestically.
"The idea of the course," says Milkovich, "is to compare HR strategies at organizations operating in Asia, South America, Central Europe and the U.S. Our premise is that all organizations within a nation or region are not the same and that understanding these differences is important -- for social justice as well as for competitive advantage. If you grasp how relationships are managed in different places, you can operate better."
For the course to succeed, Milkovich realized he needed counterparts overseas to manage local class sessions. He chose the three participating universities because he had visited them and knew colleagues there. He insisted that all students and instructors meet face to face in real time for eight three-hour global sessions during the 16-week course. That entailed not only overcoming some technological hurdles but timing class meetings to fit an international clock. For the Cornell group it has meant rising early enough to be in class by 7 a.m. once every other week, while for the Shanghai group it has meant being in class from 8 to 11 p.m.
Even more essential than the classroom contact among students is communication over the class's web site, http://courseinfo.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ilrhr697, where assignments, a class roster and relevant articles are posted, and where animated discussions can take place entirely online. The site is also where classmates on "virtual" teams blended from several countries communicate with each other on group projects.
"Intellectual engagement is what university learning is all about," said Milkovich. "So much learning happens outside the classroom. The challenge of distance learning is to use technology to capture that sense of intellectual engagement as we try to extend the boundaries of the university."
"The course dissolves boundaries between professional and traditional education as well as between time and space," says Jonathon D. Levy, executive director of Cornell's Office of Distance Learning, who tailored the technology to Milkovich's specifications. "It's the appropriate blend of the technologies for sharing knowledge and ideas. That blending is critical. It should always be pedagogy that drives technology, not the other way around."
Although the Cornell classroom functions as smoothly as a high-end television studio, it looks reassuringly like a classroom, not the control room of the Starship Enterprise that you might have imagined. The high-tech equipment that makes the synchronous broadcast
possible is hidden away below the podium and in a control booth adjacent to the classroom, staffed by two technicians. It was planned that way to keep the focus on what really matters -- learning -- says Levy. The class communicates via ISDN video-teleconferencing, with simultaneous Internet video-streaming providing two levels of real-time backup, and material on the web site supplementing the live sessions. The triple protection ensures the class will continue, even if technical difficulties arise.
Milkovich's deft hand keeps the students really engaged, not just watching a televised lecture, when the full global class is in session. Although the class is conducted almost entirely in English, the flavor is international; Milkovich's students on Cornell's campus hail from eight countries and speak many languages, which the professor uses to advantage. During the first global class he arranged for Nicole Yeh, who is Taiwanese, to greet her Shanghai classmates in their native language and wish them all a happy Chinese New Year. And during the second, he had Lara Cancian, an Argentinian-born student in the class, welcome the students from Caracas in Spanish. Those and other gestures -- such as showing maps of each speaker's home town -- were clearly appreciated and seem nice touches in a course that aims to be respectful of national differences.
Conducting the global class, Milkovich finds he needs to be a juggler as much as a professor. He must move the class along rapidly, keep his eyes on all three screens as well as the students in front of him to gauge involvement, call on his students on the other side of the globe by name, search for examples that fit the entire group, and earn everyone's passionate engagement with the topic. Although it sounds exhausting, he calls the class "the most exciting educational endeavor I've been involved in."
The excitement comes from what he sees as a real opportunity to influence the next generation of international human resource managers and researchers. In class, Milkovich observes that HR educators and managers too often rely on anecdotal information rather hard data, not always the best way to determine what HR approaches work best in different places.
"Human resource management has the reputation for being a soft field," he says. "We're sometimes seen as cowboys with big hats, but no cattle." He hopes that the course will equip students to change that perception by making more use of hard science to collect and analyze data. "I want my students to be able to build a framework for themselves, a model"-- for problem solving -- "that they can take with them and apply wherever they are working around the world," he says.
Still, anecdotal information can be a good starting point for building useful models. In one class in which globally organized teams presented their findings, a student in Shanghai surprised Western classmates when she explained that in China people's origins -- or "hu ku"-- determine where they are permitted to live and work, and people with a rural upbringing are
often consigned to work in less-desirable areas. Although individuals can achieve more mobility through advanced education and military service, permission is rarely granted for their families to move with them.
Gail Douthard, associate administrator of HR for GM's North America Car Group, is one of several employees who fly to Ithaca from Michigan to be present at the global class sessions. She is grateful for the opportunity and says: "I'm getting a real education on how different customs can affect HR. That has been an eye opener."
"It's great getting involved in a course like this," says Jan Tichy, a Cornell student from the Czech Republic who helps coordinate the course's web site. "Having direct communication via e-mail with a wide range of classmates from around the world really gives you a chance to test out international HR strategies and develop models that will work in the real world."
The full group of instructors for the course includes Ningyu (Judy) Tang and Jin Wei at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China; Nada Zupan and Janez Prasnikar at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia; and Ricardo Jiminez of the Universidad Metropolitana in Venezuela. In addition to General Motors and GM China, corporate partners in the course include: Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. ( PDVSA); Mobitel, in Slovenia; Delphi, a New York parts-making subsidiary of GM; Moviltel; Arthur Andersen; Telcel; Hay Group; Intesa; Shell; and UCAB. The overseas corporate partners are providing teleconferencing facilities -- a must in places like China, where universities lack the right equipment to broadcast internationally.
All students in the course, which Milkovich considers still in the experimental stage, also are taking part in a parallel study, led by Marcie Cavanaugh, Cornell assistant professor in Industrial and Labor Relations, on the effectiveness of distance learning as a teaching tool. The results should be helpful to future, similar courses. For more information about the course, contact: George Milkovich, (607) 255-4470, [email protected]. For information about the study and distance learning initiatives at Cornell, contact: Jon Levy, (607) 255-2055, [email protected].
Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide additional information on this news release. Some might not be part of the Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over their content or availability.
-- Course information, assignments, announcements and student tools available at http://courseinfo.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ilrhr697
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