Ten students spent a week this spring touring some Delaware companies, attending lectures on campus and making oral presentations of the final papers they had written for a course titled "Seminar on Organizations."

It would have been a full week for any business administration students–but, this group traveled nearly 5,000 miles to take part in it.

The students, from the State University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, took the course jointly with one section of UD's BUAD 429 students last semester, part of an experiment in high-tech international business study devised by B&E Prof. John Kmetz. During most of the semester, the Russian students attended class and worked with professors at their university, while their American counterparts did the same at UD. When it came time to write their final research papers, the students formed cross-cultural teams and collaborated via e-mail and the Internet.

In May, 10 of the Russian students came to Delaware to wrap up the course and meet the UD students face-to-face. They presented their research in three afternoon sessions and visited five local companies, accompanied by some of the UD students.

"They decided on their own that they wanted to come, and they paid their own way," Gennedy Konstantinov, the professor from the Moscow university who accompanied the group, says. "They are very motivated and very interested in the United States."

Kmetz says he plans to refine and expand the experiment in future semesters, adding that, in the test group, students were "thrown to the wolves" and left to work out some of the details of the international collaboration on their own.

"They had a great experience," Kmetz says. "Both groups of students had the opportunity to hear from their counterparts on all sorts of business and management issues from the perspective of the other culture."

The program developed after B&E Dean Michael Ginzberg invited a member of the Moscow faculty to UD last fall to meet with professors and administrators, Kmetz says. The idea of having students at the two universities take a course jointly, he says, grew out of some of those meetings.

"Each team had a topic for a paper–ours was Russian management–and we set up Yahoo e-groups to communicate," Bryan Hoffman, BE 2001, says. "We posted our papers and made changes back and forth, and then
we consolidated them."

Because of the distance in miles and difference in time zones, he says, the two groups were unable to set up any videoconferences. They spoke to each other directly for the first time when the Russians arrived in Delaware.

"It took us awhile to get things coordinated," Michael Smith, BE 2001, says, "but it worked out fine. I think the idea is worth continuing."