Developing a Global Mindset: Successes and Opportunities at the UI Tippie College of Business, Iowa City, Iowa, July 18, 2013

- [Charlie Funk] I wish to acknowledge our university and community supporters. The University of Iowa's Honors Program. The University of Iowa's International Programs, both contribute time talent and logistics which are vital to this organization, and today's program sponsors we also thank Integrated DNA Technologies and MidWestOne Bank. The work of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council is made possible due to the financial support of sponsors. The format today is as it usually is. Introduction to the speaker, our speaker's remarks and a question-and-answer period, and you can either raise your hand and ask questions or you can write your questions on the cards at your table and they will be presented at the conclusion of the dean's remarks. So at this time with the formalities out of the way I would like to now introduce Downing Thomas associate provost and dean, university of Iowa International Programs, to introduce Dean Gardial. Dean Thomas. - [Downing Thomas] Good afternoon. I thought I was tall but not that tall. - [Charlie Funk] Not that tall. - [Downing Thomas] Sarah Fisher Gardial was named Dean of the Henry B. Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa in 2012. One of her very first acts as Dean, in fact I believe it was her first day on the job was to graduate a class of MBA students. EMBA students in Hong Kong along with President Mason who was there as well. Previously she was Beaman Professor of Business at the University of Tennessee where she served in leadership roles including as vice provost for faculty affairs. Associate dean for academic programs in the College of Business Administration and assistant dean for the full time MBA program. At the University of Tennessee, Sarah was the recipient of several teaching awards and taught in undergraduate, graduate, PhD and management development programs. Her primary research interests are in the areas of customer value and satisfaction. She has published a book, numerous articles for journals and conferences and has had speaking and workshop engagements around the country and the world. She is the current president of the MBA Roundtable. An association of national and international MBA leaders focused on curricular innovation and Sarah earned her undergraduate and MBA degrees from the University of Arkansas and her doctorate in marketing in 86 from the University of Houston. In the fall of 2007 there were 404 international undergraduate students in total. Through at the UI. By the fall of 2012, that number had risen to 2,052. With so many aspiring business majors, the Tippie College has seen their international undergraduates rise even more rapidly in recent years than the University as a whole. From only 34 in 2005 to almost 500 today. 22% of its undergraduates are from China, Malaysia and India. I think I just gave you the answer to something there. Dean Gardial has taken steps to ensure not only that these students receive a world-class education but that their presence in the college benefits our domestic students as well and she may be saying a few words about that. I want to note in particular that Dean Gardial is one of a select group of female business school deans. Of the 79 AACSB accredited business schools, only about 18%, including the Tippie College, have female dean's. Dean Gardial is a tremendous role model for aspiring women entrepreneurs, business leaders and scholars here at Iowa. Now if you were curious about Dean Gardial before you arrived in this room, you could have easily on the website and found out all the information that I just told you but what only you and the subscribers of the Tippie College magazine know however, is that Sarah is an avid motorcycle enthusiast and in fact just got back from a great trip west and before she was named dean, some thought she would skyrocket to the top of a singing career as the next Stevie Nicks or Chrissie Hynde. So please join me in welcoming Sarah, Dean Sarah, Joan jet, Gardial, who will speak to us about developing a global mindset. - [Sarah Gardial] Thank you so much. It is a pleasure to be here with you today. I was just very excited when Ed came and asked me to come speak to your organization. I want to thank him. I want to thank Joel for helping with the AV today. This is a great tradition here on this campus. Although I've been here for a year I keep finding out more and more wonderful things about the gems that are the University of Iowa the Tippie College of Business and Iowa City and this is certainly one of them. So thank you for allowing me some time to speak with you today. I said you know it was easy to say yes when I was asked to come speak to this group because the issue of globalization and how we're creating a global mindset for our students is something that is very top of mind for our college. It has been for a while and at the end of the last nine months of some strategic visioning, globalization of our students is still one of our top strategic priorities, and so we do a lot about this, but we have more that we can do and I'm very excited about sharing some of those with you today. But I want to start with a story, and the story is this. True story. Last November I had a reception at Deere headquarters over near Quad Cities for our alums because as you might imagine the Tippie College of Business has quite a few alumni who were there and so it was kind of meet the new dean and I got to say a few words about, you know, why I was here and where I thought things were headed and then we had a reception afterwards. So I could have some one-on-one time with our alums who were there and this young woman came up to speak with me and she was probably 30-ish and she always had a big sense of urgency about her. I said she didn't exactly grab me by the lapels but she probably would have if she thought she could get away with it and what she said was, what she asked me was this, "What is the Tippie College of Business doing "to make sure that all of your students can be successful "in a virtual global environment?" And I said, "I don't know," and you can say that for a while when you're the new dean. There's a nice little period there when you can feign ignorance on things but the truth was I really didn't know. So I said, "Let me put that question back at you." I said, "Why are why are you asking me this "and what do you think that it's going to take "to be successful in a virtual global environment? "If you started breaking that down into skillsets "and knowledge and attributes what should we be teaching?" And she says I'm asking you because they're telling us that we have the skills, we have to have the skills in Deere to be successful in a virtual global environment, and I don't know what that looks like and I said, "Well we best get on with it, right?" And really that's a wonderful example from a company that's right here in our corporate headquarters but I can tell you this the world is changing quickly in terms of technology, globalization all those kinds of things. Every organization out there is running as fast as they can to say, how are we going to be successful in a world that's changing so fast that the target is moving very quickly in front of our faces? And as a business school, who is hopefully creating that pipeline of the next generation of managers, we're looking for those same answers and so the best thing that we can do is lock arms with our corporate partners and say let's move forward together. We need to understand what you know, what you're seeing. You need to look over our shoulder at the programs we have and let us know if they're sufficient or not. So as we move forward on this question, it truly is going to be a collaborative dialogue between the Tippie College of Business, our alums, our corporate partners, our employers that are hiring our students because no one really knows what this is all going to look like and how it's going to play out. So what I say is we're shooting in the dark at a moving target. That's our challenge. Where is global business headed? But we've got to get on this and we've got to get it right for our students sake. For the sake of the companies that we are providing support to in terms of employment, in terms of research in Iowa, around the world. So with that as a backdrop, I want to do the, say a couple of things at the front end making a case for why our students need a global mindset. Now in this building I can say almost literally I'm preaching to the choir on this one, right? Because you understand the answer to this question that in fact this is something that's terribly needed by our students but I want to tell you a few things that I've been hearing as I've been going around the state of Iowa in the last year and talking to employers about this idea of global mindset and what that looks like, and then I want to spend some time walking you through the initiatives that we have that are in place, and I am very proud to say that Tippie College is being very proactive, both with our domestic students, in terms of what it takes to create a more global mindset with them but also our international students that are coming here and how those two groups commingle. So I'm going to walk you through some of those initiatives and then I'm going to end with some opportunities for the future because we're not where we need to be. We've got some wonderful successes but we've still got work to do on this dimension. So I want to please suggest that if you've got questions along the way, if you want to stop me or write them down that's fine. I also want to point out that we've got a couple of faculty from the college here. Sarah Rhines Weller and Paul Weller are here and I'm going to feel free to punt questions to them as well so you guys better be on your alert today. So this idea of a virtual global company that got presented to me by the young woman at Deere. We all understand the global piece. That because of supply chains because of Technology, because of the way that companies can interact now, there's just virtually no such thing as a local company anymore, because the supplies that they're buying very well may be from somewhere out of the country. Who they're selling to; whether they have distribution channels internationally or they're selling on the internet. The whole thing because of technology has been facilitated as just the unbelievable flow of goods and services, and so geographically there there are just no bounds, and there are no time bounds either and that's the the virtual piece. That business is going on 24/7 in this world and so we're having to create ways to connect and have communications and literally it's non-stop, its global and so we know that, we know that. But then the next question is in that kind of world in that virtual global world, what is the skill set that our students need to be successful? I ask this over and over to again our corporate partners our employers, our alums who are out in the business world and the easy thing would be to say, "Well they need a foreign language," and a foreign language may well be part of the solution there, but they really go to three themes and I want to talk about these three themes because this is really what we're trying to get a handle around in terms of the kinds of classroom experiences and out of experiences that we're going to offer our students. The first thing is simply a global awareness and sensitivity alright? That Iowa is not the center of the universe and there is a bit - I know it's a surprise. You know someone actually pointed out something very interesting. Actually I read this in an article in The Wall Street Journal. That because of the way GPS mapping works for us now when you pull up a map or directions and say how do I get anywhere. It could be Cedar Rapids or it could be Siberia, the map always starts with you at the center of the universe. I think about the implications of that. It reinforces the fact that your world is the world, right? Because you're never looking out and in it's always everything starts from me where I am, which is a dangerous place, right? When you're in a global environment but basically at a very fundamental level, the idea that there are there people out there. Other cultures, other political systems. Other ways of thinking about things that, this is a perspective that we have in Iowa it is not the perspective and it's one of many and so that's probably a given and everyone understands that. The second thing which is a little bit harder for us but I'm going to talk about some ways we're addressing this, is the ability to work with people who aren't like you. Alright so the fact that we're in this virtual world means that in fact there may very well be people within your organization, right across the halls from you who come from different backgrounds but we aren't limited by that geography anymore and so you may very well be on a project team with people from around the world who are all hopping on the internet together to work on projects out of different time zones different companies, different cultures and so the students more and more are being thrown into situations where they have to communicate with, understand, work through, work with, collaborate with people who simply simply aren't like them, right? That's a skill I'll just say you can't get from a book, alright? You might get some sensitivity to it. You might get some awareness that that's important but this is something that you've got to do. You learn by doing and so really the answer to this is how do we get our students in situations where they're going to have to work with and achieve goals with people who don't look at the world the same way they do, and then the third thing and I think from an educators point of view this is the most important thing to me. Is to make sure that our students have an appreciation that diversity of thought and diversity of perspective actually leads to better business decisions. We know this, alright? So if you run people into a room and they are all from the same background. The same basic educational model. The same cultural background and throw a problem at them the solution or solutions that they come up with they are pretty narrow, because they all think the same way, right? So not surprising if you give them the same facts and data they'll all kind of come at it from the same direction and end up pretty close to each other in terms of what the solution is going to be. Over and over again we have studies, we have research that shows that the more diverse the people that are working on the problem, the more creative the solutions become, the more alternatives the better the solutions are, because you have someone in the team that is going to say, "Wait a minute what if we looked "at it this way?" Or, "I don't see that as the direction "at all I see something else," and so from an educators point of view diversity is very powerful. The ability to engage that diversity and really unleash it on very complex business problems will be better for us at the end of the day. So when I think about the global mindset and when I think about what it is that we need to be teaching our students it's not just have you taken a second language? It's not just have you taken West Civ. It's not just did you take a class in international supply chain. It really is about changing their perspective about who's out there, how they work with them, how they interact and it's a much bigger kind of mushier problem in some ways. We can't just throw them in to a literature class or a history class and check it off and say done, right? Okay, so what I want to do in the next few minutes is talk about a variety of ways that we are attacking those three issues. The global awareness and sensitivity. Working across cultures and then the appreciation for diversity. So what are we doing about this and then we'll turn it into what we could be doing. I just want to stop real quickly. Are there any questions or in any comments about the points I just made about what a global mindset is? Alright, moving on. There is an educational mandate to this and I think I've hit most of this. I'll just go to that third point. We can't just wish and hope for this to happen. We can't just throw students into cases, into classrooms and expect them to pick up a global mindset in order to really make that global mindset sink in we have to be proactive. We have to be structured. We have to go into situations with very firm objectives about what we want to have happen and how we're going to accomplish that and so this next piece is about what we're doing about that proactivity right now. I want to start with some of the statistics and Downing has talked about these, but there's just been a fundamental shift in the demographic makeup of our college and by the way I am so grateful for this. It is a gift. If you walk through the halls of Tippie on any day that our students are out milling around between classes you are absolutely as likely to hear a conversation in Mandarin as you are in English. One in five, one in four of our students now come to us from outside the United States. These are largely Asian students who come from China, who come from Malaysia, who come from India, but there's no question that as the number of international students has come has grown on campus, they have come disproportionately to the Tippie College of Business. That is true all over the country. So that's not something that's unique to Iowa City, it's not unique to Tippie but basically we've got about what, 10% of our undergraduate students now at the campus level are international. I'm going to put round figures, about 10%. In our College it's 20%, right? So that means that disproportionately students are choosing professional careers, choosing business and so we've really had to kind of come face to face very quickly with this idea of how do we take advantage of the diversity that exists in our College now that simply did not exist if you go back 10 years from now. I will also say just to throw some numbers at you that we had a little over 200 students last year that did some kind of study abroad. These would be domestic students that went outside the country for something. That is a far, far too low number for us. It's good we we love the ones that are going but we need to make more of that happen and finally that we actually have some students who are choosing to do internships abroad which is a very different level of commitment on their part. Not just to go and and take a tour or live in a country for a while but literally be in a work situation in a country. So with those numbers in terms of our study abroad and our internships abroad for our domestic students we've got a good start but we've got a ways to go. Alright I want to start with talking about our international students, because one of the things that will make all of our students more successful, both our international and our domestic students on this global mindset thing is the success that we have bringing these students in, largely these Asian students in and helping them assimilate and be a part of our culture. Actually one of the things that alarms me a little bit is that you can walk through our halls and here are so many conversations in Mandarin. The good news is it means there's a lot of Chinese students out there, the bad news is why are they all often groups by themselves having conversations in Mandarin? Why isn't that interaction going on because I'm pretty sure that they came here in order to increase their cultural immersion in our culture but it's hard for them to do that if they're staying in groups and talking to each other and not really interacting with the domestic students right? So they're not necessarily getting what they came here for, and on the other hand our domestic students are losing out. They're missing that opportunity for interaction if they're just hanging out with the domestic students and not interacting there. So one of the first places starts, not surprisingly, is with communication. We have to do things that really help support building the communication skills of our Chinese students because the more comfortable they are reading and writing here the more interactive they're going to be in the classroom. The more likely they are to jump into conversations with other people. So we've got to put some supports in place around that and I will say that the campus has English as second language supports and those kinds of things. We actually have a frank Communication Center in the College of Business that specifically is there to work with business students on oral and written communication, and my understanding from talking to the director of that program Pam Berjelly is that if you look at the appointments right now and who's coming in for help because it really is just a support resource, it's about 2 to 1, 3 to 1 Chinese students to U.S. So this is great it means that right from the get-go these students come in and they've got some help. Some of this is in small groups. Some of it's in one-on-one coaching but it helps them get those communication skills up to speed so that they can more fully interact. I'm really happy to say that we just hired in the last six months a new assistant director who actually has about around in ESL education and so she's particularly skilled in terms of this group for us, but we have discussion circles where we get the students together and just require them to have conversations and mixes of domestic and and international students. We have Chinese students who will tutor their peers. Sometimes that peer to peer instruction is very powerful. We have career counselors here that focus specifically on those students who are coming in that are going to have a different path in terms of how they go about getting a job. Whether they go back home or whether they stay here. It's a different set of challenges than our U.S. students. We have all kinds of workshops available for international students. How to put that resume together. What a resume standard model looks like in this country. How to write a cover letter. What are some of the US cultural workforce issues that they should know about? How do you network? How do you start reaching out and making connections with people who will help advance your career and find those mentors and those kind of things? These are all very powerful supports. Again just for our international students. I'll stop at that but just to say that we're very fortunate that we have, and in this case with the Frank Center these are private gifts that have allowed us to build this center that not only helps our domestic students because by the way when we ask businesses about what's the most important thing we should be teaching our students year in, year out, communication skills are at the top for all of our students. Domestic and international, and so this center allows us a really great platform to work on that with both of the students but particularly for our international students. Now the other side of the equation is our domestic students and I will have to tell you that there's a little bit of a bias here. That when they get thrown into classes with students that come from a different culture and have a different language and are a little bit harder to understand, they don't always willingly just jump right into the middle of working with those students, okay, and frankly I think it's just because it's harder for them. It makes it more work for them to overcome those communication barriers. To really work with someone who is seeing things from a different perspective. It's really forcing those domestic students to kind of stretch themselves and their boundaries and work a little bit harder to get things done in teams when there are international students and where there are not. What we have to keep coming back and reinforcing with them is the benefit of doing this. In fact Downing you just sent me a paper last week that talked about the, again research on the tremendous advantages of having purposefully mixed domestic and international students in class. They come out with bigger awareness, greater analytical skills, problem-solving. The list of the benefits of working with someone who's not like yourself are just tremendous, and so one of our jobs and we have to start talking about this with orientation with our students is you might have come from a rural high school in Iowa where you knew everyone in the school and grew up with them. You're going to be thrown in situations where not only do you not know people but these people are very different than you and here's how you should approach those situations. Here's what you can be getting out of it. Here's why employers are telling us these are great experiences for you, embrace them don't run away from them. So we've got to work on the other side of the equation just as much in terms of encouraging our domestic students. We do this in a lot of ways. Some of it is about workshops that talk about diversity and inclusivity and the power of that and the need for that in working organizations. We do it with cultural activities that allow them to - for instance have the Lunar New Year party that really more purposefully in a social setting mixes those students and then we actually have an international perspective program for students that are majoring in business and a foreign language and we're doing some particular things with them, but this is something where, what is the? What was the Korean - this I'm going to show my uh, lack of sensitivity the hip-hop culture. Sarah what was the gangnam? Yeah, yeah 'cause you see I'm not into any of that. So this rap this Korean rap singer went viral and you might have heard about this. We used that as an opportunity internally to have a group of students come together to talk about what that meant to them and how they perceive that and what that phenomenon was about, and had a mix of students from different cultures and it was great because it was a wonderful conversation that allowed them to see things from a different perspective about a fun topic, right? Wasn't related to business. We weren't talking balance sheets or Management Theory. Everyone was watching this video and it was just very hot and doing the dance and all that and so it just gave them a great venue to get together and start breaking down some of those barriers. So what I tell people all the time is while we want more students to study abroad and I think that's important and we're going to continue to push it, we don't have to send our students abroad for a couple of weeks or a semester to allow them to interact with people who aren't like themselves, they can do that every day in the Tippie College of Business but here's you know kind of underline on that. They won't do it unless we create the opportunities for them to do that. Unless we create teams where we purposely put students of different backgrounds together. Unless we continue to orient the students about the power of diversity and inclusiveness and seeing things across cultures, and so this is an area where we've got a good start but I think we've got some even bigger opportunities. I'm, sometimes people get a little bit frustrated that with this sudden increase in Chinese students is created some challenges for us and there's no question about that. We have to respond to their needs in a different way but all the benefits if we get this right, right? The benefits for everyone in the college. So I think it's a gift and we're going to run with it. Now here's the other piece of this that I want to say is important and that is what's going on with the faculty? We've got to help the faculty understand how to take advantage of this diversity in the classroom and frankly they don't all know what to do with that. How do you draw out people whose cultures make them naturally non-participatory in class. The Asian students, in particular the Asian women don't speak out in class. How do we draw them in? How do we take advantage of that? So the other third piece of this stool with the international students, the domestic students is our faculty and how we help them navigate these situations and take advantage of them to their full potential. In fact we had a workshop just this spring on how to pronounce Chinese names. That's very basic but you know what a matter of respect when you can get someone's name right, right? Instead of butchering it or saying, "Ah I don't know how to say these names," or whatever. Get their names right. It's a great place to start. So we're doing things from very big levels in terms of bringing in people with workshops on how to you know work with students in a diverse setting down to, here's your roster for your class. When you call roll how do you get their name right? Okay so I want to just spend a couple of minutes here going through a litany of different programs that we have and I'll be glad to come back and talk about any of these in more depth, but this just gives you a bit of our menu of opportunities for us to both be abroad with our faculty and have degrees abroad as well as to bring some international students back to us. CIMBA programs are in northern Italy. I was fortunate enough to be able to go to Oslo to a very quaint 18th century monastery, which has been turned into an educational Facility in which we actually offer an MBA in Italy. The students are from Italy but they're also from all over the world and a facility at a town right next door to this also offers the opportunity for undergraduate students to study abroad. They can go over for a semester in the fall or in the spring or they can go for a four-week session in the summer. Now we are actually a part of a consortium of a consortium of schools that offers this program. There are close to 30 campuses around the country that participate in the CIMBA program but it is hosted here at the University of Iowa. So we're the home institution for that and it is a wonderful benefit for our students. I will tell you that we have a terrible time getting the undergraduate students to go in the fall. They just cannot miss football and so we get, we have a little bit better shot at getting them to go in the spring and in the summer the the numbers are even higher, and they have classes in English in business while they're there during the week and then they can travel on the weekends and it's just a wonderful opportunity both on the MBA side and the undergraduate side. We have an international MBA program in Hong Kong that Downey mentioned. Literally my first day on the job I was in Hong Kong graduating and celebrating the 10th anniversary of this class. These are working professionals that live in and around Hong Kong. That come in every week to take classes with us. We are flying University of Iowa Tippie College of Business faculty over to Hong Kong all year long to teach these classes. In a few cases we've done it online but we think the advantage of our faculty getting out and taking our faculty to Hong Kong is a great advantage for us because it helps our faculty have more of a global perspective as well. So we are just now starting to experiment with offering this particular program online to a group of students in Taipei who can't get to Hong Kong every weekend and so now we're moving into a hybrid mode where we'll have some of our students in class in Hong Kong and some of our students who are actually going to be in Taipei. These students are partially Chinese but they're from all over the world. These are people who are working in Hong Kong and so they are people in those classes from the US, from the UK, from India, from China, from Europe. It's a great international mix of students in that program. We send - we have opportunities for our MBA students here in Iowa to go abroad every year. This can be a mix of our full-time students. Our part-time students, our executive students. So these trips are open to all. Most recently they were in Brazil and Dubai. They've been to Hong Kong. They've been to Germany. They've been to Chile. These are opportunities that we will continue to offer that get our students not only into those other countries but while they're there they do visits with government officials, banking officials. They do plant tours. They really are there to study how business gets conducted in that country and what are the cross-cultural differences in terms of how that happens. Here are some classes that we've offered for the MBA's international finance marketing management. These have all been offered in locations abroad in Italy, Hong Kong, Germany, Greece. International Management, International Economics. So are we half empty or no? Pass the line around alright, we're all ready. Are we half empty or half full at this point? I would say I'm always a half-full person alright. I will tell you I come at the world with what can we do next and a lot of energy. So I look at this list of things that we're doing and I'm very, very proud but I also know that there are more things that we need to do. So I'll just end with a quick list and then we can open it up. I mentioned that globalization is absolutely written in stone as much as you can in our strategic plan. This is very good. It means it's not going to go away. We have to continue to pay attention to it. At the undergraduate level we must increase the number of students who are going abroad. There is no substitute. We can talk about international cases in class. We can bring in business people who have done business abroad but the bottom line is they need the experience of being in a culture where they are a minority, where they don't speak the language, where things look sound, smell very different than where they are. We need increased engagement with our corporate business partners. So that means getting our students out to their organizations. Getting them in to speak. We have an alumni network, both internationally because of our programs in China and Italy but also in this country where we've got companies that are working across borders and we've got to bring those stories into the classroom and not make them the exception but this is the way business gets done and here's here's the story. We also need to increase the number of students working abroad. A personal agenda for me what I would love to see is that all of our full-time MBAs are required to go abroad. They're not, and so some of them choose not to and and frankly I think it's just too important a piece of the program to be left to volunteer basis and so the number of MBA students at the full time level who goes abroad needs to be 100% every year and we're going to be having that conversation. We have the ability to offer more short courses. Students don't have to go abroad for a semester. Two, three weeks we can do some great things with that. We're going to send students to China for the first time in May of 14, undergraduate students for a three-week period. We've been sending students to London for something called Winterim for several years now. It's a very, very positive program for us. Very well enrolled Italy has opened their doors and said we'd love to have students come to Europe for three weeks. Well that sounds like a really great combination, doesn't it? I mean we'd have China, we'd have Italy. We'll still keep Dubai and other things going on. We need to have footprints all over the world. In terms of the relationships we have with organizations where our students are being sent. More engagement from our non-U.S. alums. When I was in Hong Kong last year our alum said we want to continue to be a part of Tippie, how do we do that? They were absolutely right. They're on the other side of the world and we forget about them, they could be a tremendous asset to us, and then finally getting our faculty out, because the more the faculty have that global mindset, they can't help but talk about it in the classroom. So we're not there, we are half full but we've got some wonderful programs and my sense is that we will continue to move forward in very proactive ways on that. So I - it's time to stop right. I understand there's some people that need to leave at one, but I'm going to hang around to answer questions for any of you who would like to stay and discuss a little bit longer. - [Downing Thomas] A big thank you to Sarah Gardial for her talk. In just a moment we will begin the question-and-answer period. Those of you here who have questions please write them down on your cards and pass your cards to one of the volunteers who are circulating around the room. This is a reminder for ICFRC's upcoming programs on Thursday August 22nd. Gary Gleason professor from Tufts University will present on an Iowa solution to malnutrition in Malawi, Zambia and Rwanda. On August 29th someone familiar to many of you, UI professor Emeritus Joel Barkin will present on Africa After Mandela, and on Tuesday September 9th John Carlson from our College of Law will speak on Reining in Fatan's Chariot. Addressing global climate engineering. So as I'll give you a few moments to get your questions in and then we'll - we have some here already. So I'll start and I'll ask Dean Gardial to address some of these questions. Let me see. So here's here's a good one. What are your evaluation mechanisms for determining that your MBA students who go abroad are returning with new skills and knowledge that they would not or could not acquire in Iowa City? - [Sarah Gardial] That's a really great question and I will say that assessment in general in our collage and across the campus is something that we're all working harder on. How do we know what the students learned? In this case one of the things that has been suggested, we're not currently using this but there actually is a measurement instrument on global mindset that was developed at Thunderbird university which as you know has a completely global and international focus and the suggestion has been made that we could use that as kind of a pre, post. We could actually administer to that to the students when they come into the program and then administer that to them on the way out but even without that we are getting feedback from the students after every one of these programs about what went well? What did they learn? What was the impact on them? Kind of an exit interview. What do we need to do to improve that experience? So I think some combination of getting the students' self perspective is really important and their sense of what they learned and then also using something that's more objective and measurable. So I think it's very likely we'll bring on something like that. - [Downing Thomas] Is Tippie offering any MOOC courses? If yes what are some examples and what are their enrollments? - [Sarah Gardial] Okay so do I need to define MOOC for anyone here? Okay so MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Courses, and these are the literally the free courses that are being offered online by some very prestigious universities around the country right now. MIT started this about two three years ago where they literally just started uploading some of their classes into an online interactive kind of network and then saying if you want to enroll you can anywhere in the world you can enroll in these things and some of the enrollments are literally in the tens and hundreds of thousands of students that are that are taking these courses. It's a pretty interesting phenomenon because very well-respected schools, I mentioned MIT, Stanford, Duke are getting into this. The the downside is we can't figure out the business model. I mean how does that work we put all our content online for free. How are we going to continue to pay faculty to do the work, to create the course if there's no money? Ahh, you know. So stay tuned because no one really has the answer to this but there's no question that there's a lot of experimentation going on in all of Education and in business as well around putting some of our coursework literally free online. You can take this for just for your own education and I want to know a little bit more about or in some cases you can actually take it for course credit which presumably then would you know transfer back to your home institution. So it's kind of the wild, wild west of education right now because we technologically we can do it but we don't know yet if it's a good learning model. We don't know if students learn as well in that kind of format as they do in others and we can't figure out how to finance it other than No problem. So what I will say is we we don't currently have any MOOCs in the College of Business but we have a couple of faculty who are very interested in developing them and we also have a conversation going on at the campus level right now about where is all this headed and what should the University of Iowa, larger what should our play be if anything in the MOOC world - in fact we're sponsoring a workshop that'll be at the end of this August where someone's going to come in and specifically meet with the leadership and the deans of the colleges to talk about online education and where that's going and if we are where we need to be. So the short answer is we don't have any as we speak. By this time next year we could have all kinds, who knows. It's a quickly emerging area for us. Yeah Sarah. - [Sarah] I guess I will just add to that, that I have been to a number of conferences about this and I am given the impression that to the extent that a university like Iowa gets involved with this, they would do it with other universities like Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota et cetera because each course is so expensive to build, and so I think the model, - [Sarah Gardial] Yeah. - [Sarah] That is most talked about now is, well MIT has its partners schools, Stamford has its partners schools, and there are some discussions about whether, - [Sarah Gardial] There is. - [Sarah] Is that kind of... - [Sarah Gardial] Exactly. So thank you that's a good point. There is a conversation going on right now among the big ten schools to say, "What if we all got together and did this." I'll just throw out a figure. I was at a conference earlier this spring and a representative from Duke University was there and they said that their estimation is that it takes 3,000 hours of effort to take a classroom course and turn it into a good MOOC. That's a lot of work. That's a lot of work, that's a lot of money, and so you know there's a lot of reasons why we're not going to be just jumping wholesale into this, yeah. So our ability to even afford to be able to do this is. I'll just say a couple of other things to the extent that you've got the world expert in xyz. That's a great brand builder for you. So to get that person out there and create literally an international platform for him or her in terms of an academic audience, MOOCs are very good for that. They they're big splash visibility things. I'll also tell you that the California University System is doing something very specific with MOOCs because they are, have so many students that need the the basic foundational Gen. Ed. courses that you would take at the freshman level, they have a really hard time literally with enough seats in class for all the students that want to take psychology 101 and biology 101 and that entry-level English class, and so they're going to a model or they're talking about it. I think they're really there where they're going to allow students to take those courses on MOOCs and then transfer the credit and it's simply for them an efficiency measure because they can't teach all those students. All that need those courses and so they're going to designate a handful of basic entry-level courses that they'll tell the students MOOCs are fine. Go take them there, take them for a grade and bring them back to us, but they won't do MOOCs for the majors. They won't do MOOCs for the junior senior level classes and so the - you can see the strategy developing around maybe not just is it MOOC or no MOOC. It's when MOOC, right? We'll get to figure all that out. - [Downing Thomas] I think maybe we have there are a lot of great questions. Time for two more questions. The first is how do you address inner generational differences and as a starting points for people to develop a global student? - [Sarah Gardial] Yeah, well I don't know that I even have an answer that. It's a great question. I will start by saying something that we all know and that is the the students who are coming along today have a much different perspective around the world than I did when I was growing up. Their world is big and large. They've grown up with the internet. Their thoughts about traveling abroad knowing what's going on culturally. The the video that we talked about with the rapper from Korea. These students are coming to us with I think more awareness of what's out there. Just because simply the internet brings the world to them, and that's a great place to start but if you remember my three points about what means to be have a global mindset. The awareness is there have they actually had the opportunity to interact with people who aren't like themselves and understand the challenges about that? Not so much and so they come a little half-baked, right? We always have to remember that they're 18, 19, 20 year olds as well. So there's a maturity that's hasn't changed at all. So they're in, the millennials and the groups that are coming in right now are very interesting because they come in with a different knowledge base than we did certainly than I did. When I when I went to college going abroad as a part of my education wasn't even on my radar. I don't remember thinking about it deciding not to. I just don't even remember thinking that it was possible to go spend a semester in Italy. So these kids come with a very different mindset in that way but at the same time those communication skills, the interpersonal skills. The how-do-we-respect those different perspectives those are still things that we have to work very hard to develop. That's a maturity thing, that's the ability to interact with other people and that's what they can get when they when they come to us. - [Downing Thomas] The last question is, what kind of motorcycle do you have? - [Sarah Gardial] I hate this question because see what everyone really wants to say is do you have a Harley? And I have to say I am not cool enough to own a Harley. Maybe someday my cool factor will go up or whatever. In fact one of our alums is the CFO for Harley-Davidson. I was just at their corporate headquarters a couple of weeks ago and I had a motorcycle envy for sure, when I was there. Actually I have a Honda 750 Shadow. It's a great road bike and it gets me where I need to be but it just doesn't have the vroom vroom! You know, that I'd like to have. So maybe someday I can aspire to the Harley. Thank you so much you've been great. - [Downing Thomas] So the time has come to conclude today's program on behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, I want to thank Dean Sarah Gardial for her talk on developing a global mindset and I also wish to acknowledge the University of Iowa's international programs and the University of Iowa's Honors Program for their generous support. The ICFRC also recognizes its business sponsors, Integrated DNA Technologies and MidWestOne. Dean Gardial, as a small token of our appreciation we present you with the coveted Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mug. Thank you for joining us today. - [Sarah Gardial] I am greatly honored. Thank you very. I will enjoy this very much. - [Downing Thomas] Should you wish to become an ICFRC member or support our programs with a tax-deductible contribution, you can visit us at the back of the hall. Call us at335-0351, or you may mail donations directly to ICFRC 1120, University Capitol Center, Iowa City, Iowa 52242. Thank you again for joining us. We're adjourned. - [Narrator] You're watching City Channel 4. On TV, online on demand, on Facebook and now on the go on your mobile device.