Developing Synergies between Faculty and Students of European Business Schools through Telecommunication and Computer Supported Cooperative Tools

The goal of this paper is to describe a learning experiment which was initially the result of the collaboration between two Management Schools of the Community of European Management Schools (CEMS) network (Hautes Etudes Commerciales and London School of Economics) and which is being extended to other schools within (Wirtschaft University, Vienna) and outside this network (University of Maribor, Kranj). The learning experiment is a joint course on Project Management in an international environment when teams of students made up from students from each school use various means of communication to work from the distance to complete a project in limited time. Similarly, the faculties collaborate on teaching the course to their students, face to face, and to distant students at the same time using video-conferencing. Finally we shall draw some conclusions on the benefits and problems related to joint course development between academic institutions. Michel R. Klein, Valerie Gauthier, William Mayon-White, Vladislav Rajkovič 144 1. Project Management and Distant Collaborative Work: Goal of the Course In 1996 research started at HEC on the use of PC-based video as a tool to support co-operative work in teaching and research in management between faculty of European Business schools. This research described in [5] was seen as a natural extension of our research work on supporting distributed problem solving, it did not however involve the task of joint development of an computer application or of completing a project and was not aiming at creating a new course. In 1998 it was decided to extend this research to the task of joint creation of courses between European Business Schools and the topic “Project Management and distant collaborative work” was selected. This course has been offered, over several years on an experimental basis, with students from several CEMS business schools as a joint course involving faculty from the London School of Economics (L.S.E) and HEC. It has been recently extended to students of the Wirtschaft University of Vienna (WUW) and to students in Organisational Science at the University of Maribor, Slovenia. The goal of this course is to teach students how to solve a problem which has become an essential one in many companies: how to organise collaboration between persons who are of various cultural backgrounds and who are geographically dispersed. This need is the result of the globalisation of economic activity. A good description of the motivation concerning the origin of such a situation can be found in De Meyer [2] for the R&D function. What is true for R&D is also true for all other organisational functions : production, distribution, marketing,... which involve the collaboration of multinational teams. Mergers and acquisitions give birth regularly to situations where geographically dispersed individuals must work together. This type of situation is also at the heart of the challenge that Universities and Business Schools have to face if they wish to compete on the international market to provide the best possible students to global organisations; or if they wish to teach their students how to create organisations which will build their competitive advantage in their ability to create synergy between knowledge and competencies of their members whatever their location . In order to meet this challenge it is necessary for their teaching and research staff to collaborate at an international level. Also the rationale for such a course comes from the authors conviction that supporting collaborative work among people by organising them in project teams and providing them with the right software to facilitate knowledge sharing is one of the key factors to improve organisational performance. This is what some recent research work tends to support [14] One of the ideas behind having these teams working together is the idea of collaborative learning and co-operative problem solving . One is looking for participants to learn from each other. The course we set up in order create a distributed learning and teaching environment to train students to be more efficient in such a situation. The teaching is based on a methodology which mixes several learning models and relies on several communication technologies. During this Developing Synergies between Faculty and Students of European Business Schools… 145 course the students will have to follow lectures, make exercices, read and discuss reading packages and participate in a project with distant partners. 1.1 Topics of the Course The course deals with six subjects which are the following: • project management (organisational point of view) • project scheduling, project control and Project network analysis ( PERT, critical path analysis,..)