Ohio State students learn international business through pilot program

The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business

Ohio State students learn international business through pilot program

Fisher College of Business spearheaded collaboration with Panamanian university

Chris Bournea Ohio State News [email protected]

Students at The Ohio State University Fisher College of Businessparticipated in an innovative cultural exchange program this semester. Undergraduates in Professor Steve DeNunzio's lean logistics class were the first Fisher students to take part in a collaborative online international learning (COIL) experience.

"We've done lots of global business expeditions, but I'm not sure we've ever really delved into COIL," DeNunzio said. "This is uncharted territory."

Students who attend classes at the Columbus campus evaluated business operations at retail chains at the Easton Town Center. They worked in groups, communicating long distance with students at the Technological University of Panama (TUP). The TUP students studied the same stores at the Multiplaza Mall in Panama City, Panama.

The COIL experience was part of Fisher's Center for International Business and Research(CIBER) initiative. The initiative aims to enhance the competitiveness of American businesses in the global marketplace.

DeNunzio said Professor A. Michael Knemeyer, who oversees the CIBER initiative, suggested that DeNunzio offer the COIL experience as a pilot program.

"Mike approached me last autumn," DeNunzio said. "Part of that was doing this collaborative online international learning experience for students."

In developing the program, DeNunzio worked with TUP Professor Zoila Castillo. DeNunzio said he met Castillo virtually through a mutual colleague in Panama. They completed a professional development training at Florida International University this winter on how to administer a COIL experience.

"There was a framework that they presented," DeNunzio said. "Their goal was to educate Zoila and myself about how to structure an experience like this."

Castillo offered the COIL experience through her operations research class. About 30 undergraduate students at each university participated, comparing business processes in the same franchise at Easton and the Multiplaza Mall.

By working together, the students "can see that there is some kind of bottleneck in the processes, and they can identify the same problems in the United States and Panama," Castillo said. "If they have the same problem, they can figure out - both in Panama and Ohio, from different perspectives - how they can design the new solutions."

Henry Chen and Grace Branstool were among the Ohio State students who participated in the COIL experience.

Chen, a logistics management major, was a member of a group that studied Vans footwear stores. Branstool, who is majoring in logistics management and marketing, worked with a group that analyzed operations at Starbucks coffee shops.

The groups identified strategies to increase efficiency in operations. The project culminated in 15- to 25-minute classroom presentations that students in both locations recorded together, discussing their findings.

Chen and Branstool said they were not fluent in Spanish and had no familiarity with Panama before participating in the COIL experience. Their groups managed to overcome language and cultural barriers, as well as the time difference since Columbus is one hour ahead of Panama City.

Branstool said her group communicated with their TUP counterparts through WhatsApp, an application that enables users to send messages across time zones.

"We didn't necessarily run into any translation issues," she said. "We noticed that one of the Panamanian students was communicating with us more than the others, so we were thinking that maybe she was just the most fluent in English. And then when we recorded the presentation, they recorded it all in Spanish and then we translated."

Chen said one of his Fisher classmates, Julio Guerra, a logistics management and international business major, is bilingual.

"He translated for us," Chen said. "One of the students named Gabriel from TUP, he knows a decent amount of English, so that he could communicate with us just fine. He was the main middle person, and that helped the communication among the two parties."

DeNunzio said he would evaluate this semester's COIL experience and consider offering it again in future classes. He worked with Cindy Jiang, a researcher in Ohio State's Office of International Affairs, to assess how the project impacted the students' worldview, at the beginning and the end of the experience.

"They've got a cultural literacy instrument," DeNunzio said of International Affairs. "It's really to gauge whether students' cultural literacy increased."

The students said they gained valuable international business experience from participating in COIL.

"I think it was just interesting to learn about how the store operates from a manager's perspective," Chen said.

"I definitely think that this is something that the university should consider doing more often," Branstool said. "I found it really informative of other cultures and how they operate and the different emphasis on different objectives. I found it to be pretty rewarding in that sense."

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