Logging on to Learn

By Nina M. Riccio

Once, when Dr. DavidSchmidt, associate professor of business and applied ethics, was in a Hong Kong cyber café, he decided to e-mail the students taking his online business course. "You'll never guess where I am right now," he wrote. Their answers surprised him. "Big deal," one of them wrote back. "I've been taking your entire class from South America!"

So it was little surprise to him when he discovered that a student in his online business ethics course last spring was logging on from the People's Republic of China. Stephanie Arapian is an English teacher at an international school in Jinan, the capital city of Shandong Province, who decided to finish up the remaining credits she needed for the bachelor's degree she had suspended years ago.

"I had completed most of my other coursework as a visual and performing arts major quite some time ago, but left Fairfield to pursue other paths," she said, noting that those "paths" included training in Greece and an eventual teaching assignment in China.

Taking the course through University College, Fairfield's school for part-time adult students, was a natural for her, and not only because she had done the rest of her undergraduate work at Fairfield. "I had never taken an online course before, but in China it seemed that business ethics courses were rare," says Arapian. "At the start, I was both apprehensive and skeptical. But my familiarity with Fairfield - and by extension, University College - soothed my anxieties."

Still, taking an online course is quite different from sitting in a classroom each week. "One of the major advantages was being able to complete the assignment on my own time," says Arapian. "My work schedule changes from week to week, so I didn't have to worry about missing classes." As for the online discussion forum, "it was almost better than being in a classroom," she adds, explaining that it gave her and others time to think about their opinions and construct their arguments a bit better than they would have "on the spot."

"Stephanie was one of my better students," says Dr. Schmidt, who noted that the course discussions were all the better for Arapian's international experience. "She was able to describe differences in gender relationships in the workplace that she perceives in China, differences that helped our U.S. students recognize our own assumptions about gender and work. And she addressed issues of authority and hierarchy and how they play out differently for companies who do business in different parts of the world. All in all, Stephanie's firsthand observations of workplace issues and relationships in China contributed a strikingly fresh perspective to the class."

"University College offered me a course based on Western thinking, something I can certainly relate to and appreciate, yet my surroundings challenged me to step back and observe some of the differences between Eastern and Western values as well as some of the assumptions we make in the West," Arapian says.

As for challenges, Arapian had her share. There were several glitches with her Internet connection; national holidays that crept up at inconvenient times, and even unconfirmed government censoring of her e-mail communications. "It created a lot of frustration and a few moments of panic," she admits, "but things did work out in the end." So well that she's considering taking yet another course.