proceedings of Student Mobility and ICT: Can E-LEARNING

established, nurtured, and brought to fruition without having physically to go anywhere or confront anyone
F2F. In general, the level of participation in the forums was good, and certainly more evenly balanced than
if class time had been required to explore the issues. It appears that this communication medium provided
an acceptable environment for both sexes of high and low context communication to expose their opinions.
Surprisingly, we saw little of the “yes/no” response with no justification for the opinion. Of course,
students realized that they were being graded on their participation but with no direct feedback from the
professor, they seemed to communicate with each other because of interest in the topic and the existence of
the virtual platform.
Our original basis for using the discussion forum to expose opinions, points of view, and debate
was that the context-communication make up of the classroom precluded the possibility of meaningful
dialogue. People from low context environments tend to voice opinions with ease. Those from high
context environments are more reserved and deferential in their responses. They tend to refer to the
professor’s power position and therefore respond as they believe would be expected from them or would
choose to remain silent. In the world outside of the classroom, the student will be obliged to work with
many different cultural-communication contexts. The importance of having the experience in a safe
environment such as academia was significant. To be able to voice an opinion without sanction was a
relatively novel concept for many of these students. As time is an important factor in communication
across cultural contexts, the discussion forum setting made it possible for those more hesitant to respond
spontaneously to express their opinion and to enter into dialogue with their peers.
Future Research
As business ethics comes into its own as a serious field of international research, availability of
quality educational materials and learning platforms for global business training will increase in
importance. With growing international student and workforce mobility, educators have a rare opportunity
to shape the evolving global business landscape both with research and with teaching. Sophistication of
content and content deployment methods will continue to increase as physical and virtual borders merge.
The traditional homogeneous learning environment is fast receding into the archives of academia. Now that
the asynchronous forum is a mainstream learning tool, the next study will address the effectiveness of the
individual forum scenarios for exposing differences of ethical reflections based upon culture context
communication. To design scenarios which elicit reflection, good dialogue, and life effective learning
without being dogmatic or biased is challenging. It will require the skill sets of the content designer to
include cross-cultural sensitivity, generational relevancy, and academic proficiency in order to create
effective material which will motivate the multi-cultural learner who will occupy the physical and virtual
classrooms of our networked world.
Appendix
Business Ethics Discussion Forum Cases
Ethical Issue 1: Corruption in the airline industry
TPOG Aviation Services manufactures small aircrafts in the 20-40 seat range for civil aviation. In
the past, they counted long-established, prestigious companies such as Lufthansa, British Airways and Air
France among their clients. Recently, TPOG developed a new model, the TPOG LA 533 aiming at
optimizing life cycle and maintenance costs of the aircraft. However, their former clients are no longer
interested in buying this type of aircraft. Therefore, TPOG needs to explore new markets. Now they’re
negotiating a very important option for a contract for 15 aircrafts with Flying High Inc., a largely stateowned
company in country X. Yet country X has a corrupt government; bribery and special compensation
schemes are common practice. There are also three other competitors behind this contract. TPOG knows
that one of them who has already been working in this country for a long time has been involved in this
kind of practice. During the negotiations executives of Flying High Inc. hinted to TPOG that "special
compensations could enhance the chances of getting the contract." On the one hand TPOG has the
reputation to have very high ethical standards, on the other the company is in a very tight financial situation
Conference proceedings of Student Mobility and ICT: Can E-LEARNING overcome barriers of Life-Long learning?” 194