Bonnie Pribush
Leadership Program Director
317-738-8251
bpribush@franklincollege.edu
Tim Garner
Associate Dean and Director of Institutional Research
317-738-8093
tgarner@franklincollege.edu
Mark Lecher
Teaching, Learning Center Technical Support
317-738-8285
mlecher@franklincollege.edu

Franklin College
501 East Monroe St.
Franklin, IN 46131

Introduction

An idyllic campus of ivy covered brick buildings nestled around a tree-line mall in the center of a small mid-western town, what a wonderful place to study and learn. Until you realize that of the 1020 students on campus, 957 come from Indiana, 975 are Caucasian, 705 are Christian. The surrounding county has a population that is 97% Caucasian. And you want to teach students how to lead in a multicultural context!

This is not an unusual challenge, especially for small liberal arts schools. Often these schools are tucked away in small rural towns and it is difficult for them to recreate the diversity that students will encounter once they enter the globally connected work world. Yet there is no question that colleges must address the problem.

In his book Global Literacy, Robert Rosen interviewed one hundred leaders of major corporations in 17 countries. When asked what factors would predict success for a company in the twenty-first century, the top two responses were (1) developing leaders and (2) competence in multicultural settings. How then can colleges best allocate scarce resources to help students develop skills for working with people whose basic assumptions about life differ markedly from the students' own?

It is not enough to simply offer food from different cultures in the dining hall or to hold an international fair on campus. But what is enough? Must colleges provide a semester of study abroad for every student? Should colleges with relatively homogenous student populations invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in diversity scholarships to create multicultural learning communities on their campuses? Is a well-structured, well-researched curriculum sufficient? Or is it possible that modern technology can provide a more cost-effective solution? These questions complicated the already difficult job of developing the curriculum for a new course, "Leadership in a Multicultural Context," to be offered at Franklin College.

Course Development

A grant from the Ball Brothers Foundation Venture Fund (???) enabled the Leadership Program at Franklin college to bring together, in June 2000, nine scholars from different cultural backgrounds. These scholars shared knowledge of their own cultures' expectations of leaders and also served as a mini-case study in working together across cultural differences. The scholars involved were

Allen Berger, then-Dean of Franklin College

Oystein Dalland, Telemark University, Norway

Yeong-kuang Ger, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Alexander Karpenko, University of St. Petersburg, Russia

Darryl Peterkin, Dillard College, Louisiana

Bonnie Pribush, Franklin College

Ginger Seubert, Franklin College

Victor Vallee, California State Polytechnic University, California

Charles White Buffalo, Ogalala Lakota College, South Dakota

After two weeks together, the content of the course "Leadership in a Multicultural Context" was outlined and key skills necessary for leading in a multicultural context were identified. The course would begin with a study of frameworks for understanding cultural differences (Hofstede, Trompenaurs) and for understanding the important dynamics of leadership. Time would then be spent introducing experientially the skills identified (Listening for the Intended Purpose; Taking Another's Perspective; ). Then, to encourage students to apply these ideas they would be required to research in depth one culture different from their own. Finally, a simulation needed to be developed where students could practice their skills and have some experience of immersion in a different culture.

The content was solid but the actual experiences that would provide insights and opportunities for new behaviors were still lacking. Although there are cultural simulations such as Bafa Bafa and Barnega, students are often not fully invested in "play-acting" these situations. Even in their research, students would be accessing only books and articles without experiencing the reality of people whose basic assumptions differed from their own.

Since the current director of the Leadership Program was formerly a professor of computer science, she naturally looked to technology for innovative answers and she also naturally turned the college's Associate Dean and Institutional Researcher, who actively uses technology in his teaching and research. The result was a grant from Ameritech to use e-mail, video-conferencing and virtual world software to enhance the planned course.

Using Technology to Connect to Other Cultures

Having the wonderful resource of six professors from different culture backgrounds who had an interest and an investment in this course, was a resource too rich to waste. Enrollment in the class was limited to sixteen students. During the first week of class, they were asked to self-organize in groups of four around four of the six cultures (Hispanic, African-American, Native American, Russian, Norwegian, and Taiwanese). The latter four were the ones chosen.

The four professors from these cultures in the planning group were contacted and asked to serve as resource people. Two enthusiastically agreed, a third having left his university suggested a colleague who was also a friend of the Leadership Program Director, and the fourth agreed to limited participation. The following four professors were then "resource people" for the project groups researching leadership in their cultures:

Sigrid Bo : Norwegian Culture

Yeong-kuang Ger and Yu-Long Ling : Taiwanese Culture

Alexander Karpenko : Russian Culture

Charles White Buffalo : Native American Culture

In exchange for a stipend funded through the Ameritech grant, these professors agreed to respond to e-mail questions from the students and to be available for two video-conferences, the first with only the four-person research team and the second with the entire class of sixteen students. Students were encouraged to practice the skills taught in class and also to be particularly attentive to the behaviors and attitudes of their resource people as well as the information that they provided. The goal was for students to actually see how the cultural assumptions played out in normal interactions.

There were several technological challenges which were not anticipated. The first technological challenge was getting all of the equipment to work. There are two types of equipment being used. The "resource people" were all sent consumer type cameras that connect to a personal computer. These cameras cost roughly $100. The cameras were connected to a personal computer at the resource person's end. In order to conference with other people, Microsoft's NetMeeting was used. This was software that was readily available, as it comes with Windows 98 and Windows 2000, as well as on the installation CD for the cameras. The installation of the software and camera was another problem. Several of the "resource people" were familiar with computers or had access to help, while others did not. Helping those "resource people" became somewhat hard, because they sometimes only had one phone line, and it was in use for the internet connection for the camera.

The intent was to videoconference between these cameras and a video conferencing unit at Franklin College. The videoconferencing unit at Franklin is a VTEL ESA (Enterprise Series) model, which uses the ATM protocol over a T1 line. This unit cost around $15,000. The T1 for the videoconferencing unit is dedicated for just that use, so there are little to no worries about network traffic interfering with the video stream. When the VTEL unit was used with other professional level videoconferencing units, it worked very well. The picture and audio were of a very high quality, with very few "video artifacts" or jumps in the picture. When the PC based cameras were used, however, there were many problems. The picture would be very pixilated, the motion would freeze, and sometimes not show at all. These problems were due to several underlying factors. First, the resource people were using the cameras attached to regular PCs, which then used the IP protocol to connect to the VTEL equipment. This presented a problem, because the conversion from IP to ATM doesn't always work well. Further compounding this problem was the fact that the data lines being used weren't always at a high speed. Several of the resource people were connecting over a modem, which limited the capabilities due to the low line speed.

There were several things done to get around these problems. For one of the videoconferences, the "resource person" had access to a Tandberg 6000 professional video unit that gives the same or better video quality as the VTEL equipment. Problems arose during testing, however. There is a 6 hour time difference between Franklin College and Telemark University in Norway. This increased to a 7 hour difference once Norway changed time for the summer. This made finding a good test time difficult. Whenever a call would be made to Telemark from Franklin, the equipment worked well. However, whenever a call was made from Telemark to Franklin, the equipment wouldn't connect, and the call would be dropped after it started to connect. When a call was made from Norway into a bridge at IHETS (data and video service providers for Franklin College), the connection would work. When the two video units finally connected, the picture and the voice were of excellent quality. It was decided that Franklin would call Telemark when the time for the conference came near, so that a connection would be able to be made.

Another way these problems were overcome was by using a consumer camera and PC at each end. A PC with a camera was set up at Franklin College's end, with a video projector so the whole class would be able to see the image. A connection was made to the "resource person" at the other end. This method worked, to a certain extent. The picture did freeze several times, but would come back after a short period of time. The picture was of a decent quality, although nothing like what was possible with the VTEL equipment. For some of the conferences, a video connection wasn't possible, so a speakerphone was used for an audio conference.

This has been an incredible learning experience for the professors and technical support people as well as for the students. The depth of knowledge brought by the resource people could not have been easily replicated and the interest and enthusiasm among the students who were given the responsibility for establishing these connections had a positive impact on their learning.

Using Virtual Worlds for Simulation

A major concern about classroom simulations is the ability of students to genuinely enter into the experience. By using virtual worlds, the hope was that students would more easily take on different persona and play roles without inhibitions or distractions. We chose the Active Worlds Educational Universe (AWEDU) as our virtual reality platform. AWEDU uses Active Worlds technology to host three-dimensionally rendered online, multi-participant, synchronous, virtual reality environments for qualifying educational institutions. Our AWEDU world (known as "Virtual Franklin") enabled students to engage in a variety of online activities with some of the more salient features listed below:

1. 3D graphical representations (commonly referred to as "avatars") of each student in a shared virtual environment
2. Text-based synchronous chat with the capability to log chats
3. Telegrams and file transfers to other online class members
4. Integrated web browser
5. Drag and drop editor for building objects
6. Capacity for 20 simultaneous users

After an introduction to the basic functions in the virtual world, students were placed in groups and asked to "build" a world that would reflect a specific set of cultural assumptions that they were given. The creativity of the class was amazing. Once the world was designed and built, each group of four students took the rest of the class on a tour of their world. Through their behaviors and interactions, they also modeled their cultural assumptions. After each tour, the "tourists" in the world were asked to identify as many characteristics of the culture as they could. This exercise required the students to understand the practice as well as the theory of leadership in different cultures.

The final exercise, which was planned, was to create a groups with one student from each of the cultures in the virtual world and then provide them with a problem to jointly solve. The challenge here would be to stay in character and yet practice the behaviors that facilitate multicultural group problem solving. Unfortunately, it turned out that the plans for the class were much too ambitious. As often happens, the time required to familiarize sixteen students with the virtual world software was underestimated by about half. Also, because of the major research project that all students were engaged in as well as the day to day reflection papers required, much of the work in the virtual world occurred in class. Consequently, the time allocated to this segment of the course was used up before all of the planned assignments could be made.

Nonetheless, the use of the virtual world added a very positive experience for the students. They enjoyed the opportunity to be creative. They enjoyed the novelty. And after using the virtual world, the class was asked to look back on the experience as an example of cultural immersion. There are fascinating analogies between adapting to a virtual world and moving to a different culture. Modes of communication differ. Logical assumptions of how to do things (build, move across water) are disrupted by the practices of this world. Students were asked to reflect on how well they responded to these challenges. Were they in fact open to learning? Did they adapt and adjust or did they complain about the world and ask to have features changed? Did they take the opportunity to visit other worlds in the universe and learn the customs? This "meta-level" of experience required students to fully explore the analogies with cultural immersion and consider their responses.

Conclusion

As of the writing of this paper, the course is only half over. Most of the video-conferences have not yet occurred and the summative evaluation of how successful this experience was remains to be conducted. Reports on this must await the actual conference presentation. However, the experiment has been sufficiently successful and enough things have been learned, that the Leadership Program Director has committed to teaching the course again during the January intensive class and she will continue to use the technological enhancements with modifications suggested by this experience.