Students Go Global

When college marketing students team up for class projects, the headaches can come in clusters. Teammates argue over which product to build, when to schedule team meetings and who will get stuck writing the final report.

With that in mind, Cal State Fullerton instructor Les Doak decided to introduce another element of torture--er, instruction. His students must not only work with one another, but with other students around the globe.

By corresponding over the Internet, students in Doak’s multinational marketing class work with others overseas to produce their practice marketing plans. This semester, the class worked with students from Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland.

The aim is to teach students how to manage relationships with overseas partners, an important skill in an increasingly global economy. And Doak says it’s not always easy.

“We all have offices in Timbuktu that we call and never hear back from,” Doak said. “Multiple layers of communication can be extremely frustrating.”

Students are expected to divide work with their overseas counterparts and produce a final report that students in each country submit for a grade. Doak’s program, the only class like it at Fullerton, started last fall when his students joined forces with others in Quebec.

Tamara Brown, one of the students in this semester’s class, said the project was an eye-opener. The Fullerton students on her team got to pick the market, Australia, while the Finnish members got to pick the product, a luxury sailboat.

“Trying to unify eight people across the world through a computer was pretty intense,” said Brown, 32, a mother of two who expects to graduate with a marketing degree in May.

She said she was impressed with the English skills of her Finnish teammates. “I tried to learn three or four words so I could say ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ in Finnish,” she said. “But they were writing three or four pages, using words I couldn’t believe they knew.”

The project they produced earned an A, and Brown said she has a new appreciation for the complexity of export laws, customs and other hassles of selling products overseas. “I find myself looking at products to see where they’re from now,” she said.

“It made me aware of how much they went through before they got here.” Doak said next fall the class may work with students in Hong Kong or Argentina.

Greg Miller covers high technology for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at greg.miller@latimes.com