Case Study Example: Mismatches in Negotiating Partners  

 

Academic staff from the British projects visited Beijing in March 2003 to meet their Chinese partners for the first time. They needed to get to know each other, and to agree a specific collaborative project that they would all work on for the next two years (the broad area for each project had been identified, but no specifics). The British members were expecting to meet fellow-academics with whom they could discuss and agree the project, but in several cases they found they were discussing and negotiating with institutional managers rather than academic counterparts. They found this very disconcerting – to be negotiating about academic matters with non-subject experts – and the Chinese partners found it equally unsettling.

 

Why was there this difference? It was due to structural/organisational differences between British and Chinese universities in handling distance/online courses. In Britain, online courses are typically handled by academic departments, and so the eChina-UK projects were organisationally ‘located’ in Faculties, Departments or Centres whose academic staff had the relevant expertise (e.g. Faculty of Education). In China, on the other hand, the projects were located in special units that were responsible for distance and/or continuing education. These units did not have their own academic staff, but rather had to buy in such expertise from other parts of the university when it was needed.

Case Study Example: Establishing Modes of Communication for Trans-continental Contact 

 

The British and Chinese project members were based at opposite sides of the world, and so they needed to establish effective modes of communication for different purposes. The options included:

• Face-to-face meetings (exchange visits – short stay or extended)
• Email
• Video-conferencing
• Telephone & fax MSN,
• Skype Chat
• Online collaborative platform

 

Shortly after the projects had their first joint meetings in March 2003, the SARS epidemic broke out, preventing further face-to-face meetings for several months. Some time later, a major computer virus affected Beijing universities, so that some project partners were unable to have email contact for about 3 months. Teams, therefore, needed to establish and agree effective modes of communication, taking into account practical constraints. In line with research findings (Maznevski and Chudoba 2000), they found that face-to-face meetings were necessary for complex discussions, and that email was efficient for straightforward, factual matters. People’s experiences of video-conferencing were less popular – partly because of poor connection quality, and partly because of the formal way in which they were arranged.

 

Comments by the University of Sheffield team

• We used a 'mosaic' of communication tools to support collaboration between members of the distributed team: email, a virtual learning environment (VLE), video-conferencing, and face-to-face meetings. This variety helps to cater for individual preferences, as well as take advantage of the value of each mode of communication.
• We decided to share key documents by email, so that all group members were circulated and had time to reflect upon key ideas without the immediate pressure of instant communication. We decided to use periodic video-conferences to enhance our sense of being together in a shared project. These often had an air of formality that made the exploration of details difficult to achieve.
• We decided that face-to-face contact was important to develop understandings that could not be achieved electronically.
• We used 'action points' in our face-to-face meetings to provide some continuity of working between meetings.

Comments by the University of Cambridge team

 

Although most of our academic developers were located in Cambridge, one of them was living in Austria at the time. So we not only had to ensure smooth communication between team members located in Cambridge and Beijing, but also between content developers in Cambridge and Austria. Regular face-to-face meetings were arranged for team members as follows:

• Weekly meetings in Cambridge between the academic developers and the online developers
• Monthly meetings, usually in Cambridge but sometimes in Beijing, for the academic developers and project managers

Case Study Example: Communication Networks and the Distribution of Information

 

Several of the projects were large, involving up to 35 people in Britain and 35 in China (including senior managers etc.). So for these large projects, establishing effective communication networks was important: i.e. deciding who should be kept informed about what issues. It was not appropriate to waste people’s time with issues that didn’t concern them, yet it was important that they felt involved and updated on developments. This was not at all easy to achieve, and we never really resolved this satisfactorily. One Chinese team member gave the following evaluation:

Chinese Researcher:

In your opinion, was the communication effective?

Chinese 20:

No, it wasn’t. Though both Chinese and British sides had their own project managers, they couldn’t do all the communications on their own. We should have embedded different communication mechanisms in the project at different levels.

Case Study Example: The Impact of choosing English as a working language  

 

All of the British teams initially relied almost exclusively on the Chinese partners’ abilities to speak English. None of them had any Chinese-speaking team members at the start of the project, and so the burden of interpreting and translation fell almost entirely on the Chinese partners. For one of the projects in particular, this was a heavy burden. Language affected not only team interaction but also course development and mutual exchange and evaluation of each other’s materials (everything had to be translated from English to Chinese, and from Chinese to English, so that the Chinese and British academic developers could give feedback on each other’s work. This course was aimed at middle school teachers who were non-specialists in English, and so much of the final courseware needed to be in Chinese. This was problematic and unfair on the Chinese partners, and some of them felt quite strongly about this:

Chinese 21:

The working language was English. Due to the language problems, when we couldn’t express ourselves clearly, it seemed that we were disadvantaged. But as a matter of fact, the British were thinking hard to get what we wanted to say.