This week, 40 students from 4 countries finished their participation in the International Marketing Course. For me, as organizer of the event, this meant prompting all students to fill in the Evaluation Form, and anxiously looking at their opinions to see how to further improve this course.

Currently I’m also a member of the MoreVM-project, which aims, amongst others, at preparing people for their first Virtual Mobility course. For instance, lots of students from traditional universities have never taken a distance course, let alone a distance course at a university in another country. One of the ambitions of MoreVM is to provide those interested with the basic knowledge required to successfully participate in a VM-course.

Do students really need to prepare for VM? Why not just start with your first course? What can go wrong? Did anything go wrong in the International Marketing Course (IMC) that finished last week?

Two points stand out.
First, the international composition of the student groups is simultaneously the strong point and the weakness of this form of VM. In the IMC, students from Poland, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands had to work together, for instance in an assignment on market segmentation – which required a visit to a local supermarket and checking out the different types of chocolate bars. Some students went all the way, sacrificing themselves in the interest of science: they tried all bars!
What went wrong, is that the students from different countries did not all have the same capacity for independent work, sometimes resulting in an impasse, as some students didn’t spontaneously report their troubles, causing delays in the group as a whole. The more independent students didn’t understand that the difference was caused (in part) by the cultural characteristics of the nations of their colleagues.
The lesson seems obvious: both students and tutors of internationally composed study groups should be sensitized, before the course starts, with a theory on cultural differences, e.g. the characteristics of Geert Hofstede (Power Difference; Masculinity/Femininity etc.).
Luckily, the More VM-project had foreseen this outcome, and already has made developing a cultural survival kit one of its goals.

Second, for some students in the IMC this was their first distance course. This meant, e.g., that they didn’t have a feel for when to most profitably contact their tutor – again resulting in some delays. This outcome has also been foreseen by the developers of the More VM-project, who have programmed a preparatory VM-course for students as the remedy. By the way, some of the tutors said that they also would welcome some preparation for their part in a virtual mobility learning course.

One encouraging preliminary result of the IMC-evaluation deserves mentioning. The majority of the IMC-participants have stated that they would gladly take another VM-course, if the opportunity presented itself. As the EU is aiming to stimulate VM in a major way, it seems more than likely that they will get plenty of opportunities to study like that again and again. As a lot of professors, we feel that VM is the way of the future.

If you want to respond to this blog by letting us know what you feel is most needed as preparation for a VM-course, both for students and tutors, please do!