Teamwork Across the Internet: the Ethics Project Dennis Bialaszewski Indiana State University Thomas Pencek S.U.N.Y. College at Fredonia There has been a myriad of distinct approaches to distance education. Advances with satellites have made televised courses more common. Discussion related to these offerings sometimes center on remote sites being able to interact in real time with the course being delivered. The Internet has also added opportunities for distance learning. Schools are able to offer entire courses through the Internet. A faculty member in a small Northeastern school is teaching in an environment where not many computers are networked and there is little Internet access. Moreover, they are still having problems with their e-mail delivery. After a few conversations, it was decided that the Northeastern school and the Midwestern school should join their students in a distance project. The faculty member in the Northeastern school is teaching a Business Research Methods course. The faculty member at the Northeastern school felt that aside from teaching the traditional research method techniques, he wished to have team concepts incorporated into the course and also expose the students to the Internet, if possible. The faculty member at the Midwestern school was teaching a Systems Analysis course. In the Systems Analysis course, students were introduced to the systems life cycle (planning, analysis, design, implementation, and use) via a team project. Students were teamed to construct a team Home Page. They were taught HTML and at an early stage learned quite a bit about surfing the net as they explored many types of existing home pages to get ideas for their projects. Approximately 65 Business Research Methods students were put in teams of five and they were teamed up with two students from the Systems Analysis class at the Midwestern school. As an aside, the Midwestern school students had studied chapters such as “Facilitating in the Face of Conflict” from the text Quality Before Design - Requirements Analysis by Donald C. Gause and Gerald M. Weinberg. The Midwestern school students had all classes held in the AT&T Lab and checked their e-mail M-W-F at a minimum. The Northeastern school students had limited access to a quality e-mail system. The innovative approach in this distance education experiment was that the Northeastern school students were given accounts on a UNIX server at the Midwestern school. Thus, they used telnet to access a server and became exposed to an operating system and some Internet capabilities that they might not have otherwise experienced. The project joining students from the three school has three phases. The first phase of the project was primarily a team building exercise. Students were allotted two weeks to get to know each other. They asked questions of team members, such as: what type of community do you live in, what are your hobbies, what is your major or minor, have you had an internship, and even questions about the weather and climate. Thus, students got to know each other. After two weeks, the facilitator for each group made a short oral presentation describing their team mates. In the second phase, the students learned a little about the environments that their team mates were working in. They were to research the computing opportunities at their respective universities and communicate. This would help to “limit expectations” in the completion of the project. We were not looking for too technical of an exchange at this point. The emphasis was to better understand the environments that team members had. In all phases, teams were encouraged to send an e-mail to the facilitator at the “other” institution with a CC to all other team members. Students were allotted one week for this portion of the project as it was assumed that students would now be more familiar with e-mail and that a facilitator at each site was able to easily communicate and share information with members at their own site. In the third phase, students were asked to complete a research project in which they were to determine the opportunities to obtain courses, training, or research opportunities offered by schools of business in the area of ethics. Thus, students were to determine not only what courses or significant portions of courses exist in business schools that emphasize ethics, but also, determined what business schools have institutes existing for the purpose of teaching, training, and researching in the ethics area. Students at the Northeastern school were asked to use GOPHER through the UNIX server at the Midwestern school. They could search through course catalogs with a keyword such as ethics, or scan other avenues at the universities. Thus, students initiated their GOPHER search remotely. They were to share their findings with all team members. The students at the Midwestern school were to surf the net using a browser and search using a search engine such as YAHOO or LYCOS. These students had classes in a lab environment and had a definite advantage in this respect. This information was to be shared to all team members. Thus, students working as a team could enhance their research efforts by sharing information on availabilities for studying ethics offered by the various business schools. The students would have been much more limited in their efforts if they could not have relied on shared information. More so, the schools shared facilities remotely to allow GOPHER access by another school. Students were allowed slightly more than two weeks for this final stage. Through the process, faculty members from both schools communicated with all students involved in the project. Actually, students were taught a little UNIX remotely also. The final step of this last stage was to have a facilitator in each group provide the name of another group member to make a short oral presentation of their findings. It is the feeling of the authors that this experience benefitted many who were involved. The findings Phase 1 was primarily a team building exercise. It worked reasonably well. However, one team which had a self-proclaimed computer expert from the Northeastern school was deemed to be dysfunctional by the Midwestern school and disbanded. This resulted in a bit of a problem for both schools as students needed to be reassigned. In this phase, some teams communicated via e-mail 15 or 20 times while others did not do as well. There was more confusion than expected in Phase 2. Some of the questions students asked were: • How many labs do you have? • What time can they be accessed? (24 hours?) • What type of computers are available? • What type of Internet utilities are available? • What type of operating systems (OS/DOS/UNIX/MAC/VAX/etc.) are available? • Do most of your MIS/CS classes require computer labs? • What software are available (Lotus 1-2-3 v. 5, Excel, etc. . .)? • Are any of these software required under MIS/CS courses? • What are your professors like? Easy to get along with? • Do you feel your courses will help you in the future? It was surprising as to how little Internet access was available to the Northeastern school. Phase 3 had students share information about the opportunities to study ethics with a focus on the business curriculum. Netscape was used and search engines such as Web Crawler, Yahoo, and Lycos. Gopher was also used. Two frequently mentioned Gopher findings are the UCLA - Business Teaching Society and the Harvard Business School - Can Ethics be Taught? Perspectives, Challenges, and Approaches at Harvard Business School. “Can Ethics be Taught?” traces the evolution, strategy, and implementation of the path- breaking Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Responsibility program at the Harvard Business School. A required course and four new electives have been added to the curriculum. Course heads have begun to integrate issues of ethics and corporate responsibility into the first year curriculum. The Business Ethics Teaching Society relies on a Listserver and posts messages to all members. There is a FAQ area. BETS is a group within IABS. To contact IABS, contact Jeanne Logsdon (jlogsdon@bootes.unm.edu) - the IABS treasurer. I have joined IABS and have thoroughly enjoyed following the dialog of people committed to the teaching of business ethics and community involvement. At the time of this writing, the address to BETS is: http://www.usi.edu/bets/index.html. The following will be a listing with brief description of some of the remaining findings. DePaul University offers a home page. Netiquette information is provided. The company Praxis conducts workshops on business ethics that companies can conduct at their businesses. Moreover, DePaul offers an Ethics Institute. The Institute for Business and Professional Ethics at DePaul’s address is: http://www/depaul.edu/ethics. The home page for Netiquette is actually from Arlene Rindek of Florida Atlantic University. Included in this home page is the ten commandments for computer ethics. The address for the Netiquette home page at the time of this writing is: http://www.fau.edu/rinald/net/index.html. The Praxis Consulting Group specializes in helping managers become more effective in managing people and teams. They offer an ethics workshop. The address to Praxis is: http://www.trac.net/users/praxis/trgprog.html. Aviden Library exists, which offers films on computing ethics, work place issues, censorship, computer crime, etcetera. The address for information on the video library is: http://www.earthlink.net/-cfpvideo. Specifically, the address for the ethics information video is: http://www.earthlink.net/-cfpvideo/cfp/14.html. The Ethical Business Home Page is a directory of ethical and environmental business. The home page is located at http://www.bath.ac.uk/centres/ethical/home.html. The National Association of Socially Responsible Organizations can be found at http://policy.net/mastro1. The address to access the Better Business Bureau is: http://www.bbb.org/bbb. Using Web Crawler, a link contains a list of courses involving seven different universities. It can be found at http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/6095/related-courses.html. Arizona State University’s School of Business provides the following link: http://www.cob.asu.edu.misc/hilites.html. They claim to be one of the first universities to offer ethics within the business curriculum. A Lycos search provided a link to Harvard which dealt with ethics. This link is found at: gopher://gopher.harvard.edu:70/oro-2820-/.courses/bus/edesc/mba2/mba2courses/bus1584. Pages that relate to ethics offerings but no specific courses are: http://www.ethics.ubc.ca from the University of British Columbia, Center for Applied Ethics and the Institute for Study of Applied and Professional Ethics at Dartmouth College, found at: http://www.dartmouth.edu/artsc/ethics-inst. There are several other institutes, such as the Center for the Advancement of Ethics at Wyoming University. Furthermore, details on specific courses were also obtained. For example, Carnegie Mellon University offers courses such as Ethics Judgments in Professional Life, Business Ethics, and Management; Environment and Ethics, as well as others. Business Ethics is a course also taught at Butler University, which offers a quite interesting related course titled, Ethics in Television and News. One student who transferred to the Midwestern school had taken an ethics course as part of the curriculum at Vincennes University. Some other courses located were BA 243 at Pennsylvania State University, which covers the social, legal, and ethical environment of business. Business, Government, and Society is MGMT 430 at Wichita State University. It examines the environments in which business operates. It includes business ethics. Business ethics is incorporated in Legal and Social Environment of Business at the University of Northern Iowa. A course titled, Organization Ethics and Employment Law is offered by Boston College. Whereas, many courses detail ethics in United States business; BUS 502 - Global and Cultural Environment of Management covers ethics outside of the United States at North Carolina State University. They cover ethics in the U.S. in BUS 501. At Pepperdine University, BSMG 423 emphasizes ethical responsibilities of business. Their BSMG 418 emphasizes management ethics. The University of Western Ontario offers Business Ethics - 126 F/G. It is an ethical analysis of issues arising in contemporary business life. Sample topics include ethical codes in business, fair and unfair competition, advertising and consumer wants and needs, conflicts of interest and obligation, as well as other related issues. The University of Pennsylvania offers CIS 590, which is Computer Ethics and Society. A similar course is found at the University of Delaware - CSCC 355, Computer Ethics and Society. It explains relations among information technology, society, and ethics by examining issues brought about by the widespread use of computers. A related course is found at Boise State University, titled Ethical Issues in Mass Media, while the University of Denver offers Current Ethical Issues in Business taught by its Engineering department. Computer ethics is also taught at Virginia Tech - CS 3604, which studies the social impact of computers on society. ENGR 350 - Computers, Ethics, and Society is taught at California State - Long Beach. PHL 250 - Philosophical Foundations for Ethical Understanding is taught a Creighton University and East Tennessee State University offers Ethical Issues in the Use of Computers. The University of Notre Dame offers CAPP 380 - Electronic Information Processing, which incorporates computer ethics as students learn about the Internet. MIT offers STS 088 - Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier. The above is a sample of the findings that students presented. Again, their search was only via Netscape using various search engines and Gopher. Conclusion It was a great experience for students and faculty. Students from two parts of the country worked together and learned that ethics is being integrated into the business curriculum in many, many parts of the country, as well as outside of the United States. Some of the comments the students embedded in their conclusions are: “This project was a joint effort on the part of all team members. Each person actively participated in all phases . . . This project has been very valuable as a team building experience.” Another student wrote, “I believe this project has made me a better person. It has made me learn to work with people and listen to other people.” A team provided the following in their conclusion, “There is a wealth of ethics information available for business ethics, both through classes at universities and through sources on Netscape . . . The information is readily available for those interested.” There are many, many similar statements, but let us close by providing the quoted conclusion provided by students, Matthew Doll and Jimmy Leow: “The opportunity to work briefly in the business environment of the future will likely prove to be of great value to each group member. The business environment of the future being anywhere and everywhere. As students, we have had the opportunity to communicate as a team without ever seeing each other or even previously knowing each other. This is an experience many of today’s business people have not yet even encountered but may soon be forced to deal with; and to think we are possibly one step ahead in experience over someone who has been working for thirty years. This was truly the most unique group work any of us have done in our classwork, especially with the natural development of subgroups within the main group due to geographical location. We also realized how much more important information is to a project than other factors. This project was done almost entirely with information alone. The success of the project was not contingent upon what the participants looked like, what they smelled like, what they sounded like, or how they dressed. This made it impossible for group members to form opinions about each other based on appearance which could harmfully affect the chemistry of the group. What was important was each members thoughts, goals, and most important, the ability to process and communicate information effectively; the last of which is a skill each of us has improved since starting this group project.” References Work performed by the following students: Amy Adams Jason Boyles Richard Brye Stephen Chastain Janis Cooprider Melissa Crum Matthew Doll Stephanie Downing Lisa Francis Troy Harrison John Huemmer James Hughley Michelle Kieffner Robert Kirchoff Craig Kixmiller Jimmy Leow Paul McDaniel Linette Meunier Lisa Meunier Thomas Murray Autumn Poole Lisa Rudisel Eduardo Soares Aaron Stidham John Whitted Jeanne Logsdon (jlogsdon@bootes.unm.edu http://www.usi.edu/bets/index.html http://www/depaul.edu/ethics http://www.fau.edu/rinald/net/index.html http://www.trac.net/users/praxis/trgprog.html http://www.earthlink.net/-cfpvideo http://www.earthlink.net/-cfpvideo/cfp/14.html http://www.bath.ac.uk/centres/ethical/home.html http://policy.net/mastro1 http://www.bbb.org/bbb http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/6095/related-courses.html http://www.cob.asu.edu.misc/hilites.html gopher://gopher.harvard.edu:70/oro-2820-/.courses/bus/edesc/mba2/mba2courses/bus1584. http://www.ethics.ubc.ca http://www.dartmouth.edu/artsc/ethics-inst