Attn: Faculty members in Asia, Europe, Latin America teaching International Business this Fall semester
I teach International Business at the U. of North Carolina, Greensboro (USA) and would like to try a teaching exercise/simulation this fall semester that would give my students some first-hand international collaboration experience. If you teach International Business at a university outside North America this fall, perhaps you would be interested in teaming up your students with my students and assigning them is simple course project that they would need to complete together. This would provide students with an excellent opportunity to experience challenges of doing business internationally and make the course much more interesting and practical, and perhaps lead to more inter-institutional and inter-personal collaboration in the future.
To keep it simple, I am thinking about forming teams of about 4 students (2 from my course, 2 from yours, or more if more than two universities participate) and giving them a group project that they have to complete over the course of the semester. The team then submits a group report, possibly accompanied by individual brief reports on experienced challenges, solutions, etc.
Here are some "compatibility" details:
I teach a pretty standard undergraduate introductory International Business course (starts late Aug, end mid Dec) that covers common IB topics such as Globalization, Cross-Cultural Business, Economic Systems, International Trade, FDI, Regional Integration, Intl. Financial Markets, Intl. Strategy, Intl. Marketing, Intl. HRM, etc. I will have about 150 undergraduate students this fall.
I am very flexible about the specifics of the project. Ideally, I would like to team up with one or two other professors who teach similar courses (similar content, enrollment of 50+) in Asia, Europe or Latin America. The group project should require about 10-15 hours of work over the course of the semester and should count for 10 to 15 percent of the course grade. A have developed an assignment that we can use, but I am very flexible about making changes to ensure that the project fits your teaching objectives and expectations.
If interested, please contact me and we will work from there.
Vas Taras
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Vas Taras, PhD
Department of Business Administration
Bryan School of Business and Economics
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
349 Bryan
POB 26165, Greensboro, NC 27402-6165
336-256-8611
v_taras@uncg.edu
www.vtaras.com