SUNY COIL Conference 2018

COM3080 is an undergraduate Virtual Team Work course provided by the Department of Communications at Baruch College. The course embeds an international online collaboration project for six weeks in its Syllabus. The course addresses many of the skills modern organizations seek when hiring new employees: team work skills, familiarity with online collaboration tools, cross-cultural and people management skills, and cultural and emotional intelligence (see e.g. World Economic Forum, 2017: The Future of Jobs). In the beginning of the fall term 2017, students at Baruch were asked to team up in class to form local teams. During the first six weeks, studying was focused on acquiring knowledge on virtual teams, drawing on research on advantages, challenges and best practices for online collaboration. These weeks were used for practicing virtual work within the Baruch teams, benefiting of the collaborative tools available on Blackboard. At the midterm, each Baruch student was placed in an international virtual team of 5 or 6 students, to work together on a corporate style collaborative platform for six weeks. The international teams represented various locations in the US and in India in the fall 2017. This six week module is called “Virtual Business Professional” or “VBP” project, and it can be embedded in many different types of curricula providing opportunities to teach skills required in international online collaboration. The module brings the world into the classroom in Baruch College in two ways. First, we took benefit of the inherent diversity of the Baruch College as a classroom resource for acquiring understanding of culturally different communication and behavioral practices. Secondly, students put their newly acquired skills into practice in the VBP project when working with students of different cultural and university backgrounds in the international teams