It was a whirlwind introduction to Dallas, including the summer heat, for Dr. Michael Benson, a professor at England’s Sheffield Hallam University’s (SHU) business school, on his recent weeklong visit to The University of Texas at Dallas.
The visit was the culmination of Benson’s participation in a collaborative course piloted by SHU and the Naveen Jindal School of Management this spring. Benson partnered with Professor Mary Beth Goodrich, academic director of Distance Learning at the Jindal School. The course concluded with a hybrid in-person and virtual presentation and debriefing.
They plan to teach the course again this fall in their respective schools in Fall 2023. In the Jindal School, it is offered as the Capstone Senior Project—Business (BPS4395) by way of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL).
COIL links classrooms and students from two or more higher education institutions that are in different countries or cultural settings. It provides an opportunity for students to study globally without the expense of traveling and provides valuable global work experience for students who likely will one day be working globally.
Local and Virtual Support
Goodrich and Benson gave the in-person presentation with the virtual support of faculty members at SHU as well as Dr. Carol Cirulli Lanham, Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) assistant, assistant dean for Outreach and Engagement in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences (EPPS) and director of COIL at UT Dallas.
“We are in a global community today,” Lanham said in opening the program. “In 2020, as we all know, all kinds of things came to a halt, including our study abroad. But even before 2020, only a small percentage of our students were able to travel internationally to study abroad. While (virtual learning) is not new, some universities have used it for 25 years, it is new to many of us who started during the pandemic.”
Virtual learning provides an opportunity for anyone to study abroad. Bee Yee Gan, head of Global Academic Development at Sheffield Hallam, said she and her colleagues were attracted to COIL because the technology-enabled education program has an inclusive and equitable approach and it is affordable.
Sheffield Hallam is a public university located in the town of Sheffield, England. Sixty-five percent of its students are first-generation college-bound — 22 percent of UTD’s undergraduate students are first-generation. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fewer than 1 percent of students have been able to travel for an international exchange program. SHU started the COIL program in spring 2021, a year after UT Dallas.
“When we started the pilot program, which was back in March, we were already five weeks into our semester,” Benson said. When June (June Clarke, principal lecturer, Department of Finance Accounting and Business Systems) came to me and asked if we could integrate this, we already had 39 projects on the go with five or six students in each group. So it was pretty much a deep dive straight in.”
Benson said of the opportunity, “I wanted to say no, but it came out as yes.” Clark also added that “no” was not given as an option.
JSOM Student Helps Introduce Cornhole to UK City
Brianna Harrington, a full-time Cohort MBA student at JSOM majoring in marketing, participated in the collaborative COIL this spring.
“I liked being able to use what I have learned about marketing,” she said. “I also liked being able to work on a real-world project and being there to see the benefit of the work our teams did.”
Four participating student teams in the U.S. partnered with five teams in the U.K. They selected a business to work with from a list of participating companies, all based in the U.K., including HSBC, Marks & Spencer Food, SHU Racing (which had a costing and sponsorship team linked with one UT Dallas team) and Alder Bar Sheffield.
Harington’s team and their counterpart in England opted to work with a small business, Alder Bar, located in Sheffield.
“It was a unique situation, because the owner, Joe Spriggs, was also a Sheffield student, so he was consulting on his own business,” Harrington said.
The team brainstormed ways to raise the bar’s profile and bring in more customers. One suggestion to provide games for customers resulted in the introduction of a very American pastime to their friends across the pond—cornhole.
The game consists of a slanted plank of wood with a hole cut in one end. Players stand at the opposite end and toss small bean bags toward the hole with the hope of dropping them through. Points are also gained by landing on specific spots on the board.
Harrington and her teammates created a cornhole game prototype specifically themed for Alder Bar. Spriggs, who had never heard of the game, had it built to specifications. Since it is believed to be the only game of cornhole in the entire city of Sheffield, it gave them a “cornhole” story to share whenever they recount their collaboration.
(The game) has been well-received and this whole experience (of working with the students) was enlightening,” Spriggs said. “Being caught in a cross-cultural collaboration was wonderful.”
The students also determined that the bar would benefit from more targeted marketing.
“It is located near the university, but several similar businesses are closer,” Harrington said. “However, it is very near a hospital, so we recommended marketing it to people who work there. We also surveyed students in the MBA cohort program to learn what would bring them out to go to a bar.”
The plan for Alder Bar included changing up some of its social media, partnering with local food vendors on special events, adding a happy hour and adding nonalcoholic drinks to the menu.
That’s where Harrington and her team were able to engage members of her JSOM class in a brainstorming and taste-testing exercise.
“Her team brought some mocktails (nonalcoholic cocktails) to class for everyone to try and conducted a brainstorming session,” Goodrich said.” They came up with great ideas.”
The group made up a drink called the Bloody MBG. All agreed that the session was fun and productive.
Memorable Moments Created
Goodrich talked about wanting each student to have a story to tell such as a “chocolate piñata moment,” referring to a new chocolate product created by the teams that will soon make its debut in the stores of popular British retailer, Marks & Spencer Food. On Benson’s first day in Dallas, he was treated to a visit to iconic Dallas restaurant Uncle Julio’s to see its famous chocolate piñata and to meet clients with whom the team would be working in the course from the U.S. side.
During his visit, Benson met with several UT Dallas deans and professors and attended Dr. Diane McNulty’s Executive MBA course, where he heard from speakers with Deloitte on environmental, social and corporate governance initiatives. He toured Honor Yoga studio and made a recording in UT Dallas’ Educational Testing Service (ETS) recording studio.
Benson was also treated to an array of Texas cuisines. In addition to Tex-Mex at Uncle Julio’s, Goodrich took him Northside Drafthouse & Eatery — a U.S. version of a British pub —Whataburger and barbecue picnic hosted by Darren Crone, assistant provost for ETS. He also met with UT Dallas students who will be in the fall COIL at Free Play, a retro arcade.
One of the collaborations that the pair hope to showcase in Fall 2023 is the project with UT Dallas’s Formula One Car and Sheffield Hallam University’s similar program, SHU Racing which was founded by and is run by students who design and build a formula student competition car yearly. After working with SHU Racing last semester, the professors decided to approach the students working with the UT Dallas Formula One car to see if they would want to collaborate, too. Goodrich, Benson and others were able to see UT Dallas’ car after their presentation. This collaboration includes many different schools at both universities.
“Benson was able to make great connections while at the university and that is not the only thing he is leaving with.,” Goodrich said. “He will be leaving as SHUman, a nickname that suits him for several reasons. His university is SHU and then, he was complimented many times for his shoes. Our plans for the next session of SHUTD collaboration are for some of the lectures given in the U.K. and U.S. to be seen by students ‘across the pond,’ synchronous collaborative team building activities and to build cultural awareness and working together to help each other on the projects in various ways.”
“It’s a real, full collaboration, a real definition of the word,” Benson said during the debriefing session.
“I don’t know that we are allowed to have this much fun teaching, but I can tell you, Michael and I are,” Goodrich added.
They hope that their upcoming students will enjoy the experience as much as they have. They look forward to the chocolate piñata, cornhole, and SHUman stories yet to come.
Goodrich and Benson also received an inaugural grant from the Texas International Education Consortium for the work they are planning to continue in Fall 2023 and beyond.
