Improved Pedagogies in Teaching International Business

1. Improved pedagogies in teaching ib

Teaching IB is arguably more challenging than other more narrowly focused disciplines. For example, it faces business challenges that require the application of multiple other narrower business disciplines, such as marketing or finance, yet also the ability to apply them to accounting for foreign cultural and institutional conditions. IB education should enable IB students to develop professional knowledge and skills to meet the needs of international organizations facing high uncertainty caused by the dynamic global geopolitical and socioeconomic environments and rapid technological changes. IB teaching requires the development of different (and global) mindsets. Teaching IB is inherently multidisciplinary and, given the additional need to teach cross-cultural and cross-institutional knowledge and skills, arguably requires extra resources. This need for extra resources for IB teaching has been a long-understood issue but without adequate resolution in most business schools (e.g., Aggarwal 2008; Kwok et al. 2022).

We need the development of innovative pedagogies, especially pedagogies that are easy and inexpensive to implement. Classroom pedagogies in teaching IB are critically important, especially as IB is a complex multidisciplinary subject where student cognitive changes are often required to be supplemented by behavioral changes. IB teachers have adopted and expanded some traditional experiential learning pedagogies such as group projects, case studies, internships, and study-abroad trips to enhance students’ learning experiences. However, just as global organizations need to constantly evolve to adapt to the new business environment caused by the advancement of technology and socioeconomic changes, IB teachers also need to frequently reflect on the current pedagogies to adjust to the new environment and the changing needs of the industry.

One of the important ways to reduce costs and increase the effectiveness of IB teaching pedagogies is the increasing adoption and utilization of technology. In our recent reflections on enhancing international business curricula in the post-COVID era (Aggarwal and Wu 2020; Aggarwal and Wu 2021), we highlighted the importance of technology infusion into curriculum and pedagogy designs. This view is reinforced by Klarin et al. (2021), who echoed the critical role of online education as being at the top of the agenda for improving students’ learning and experience. Technology can certainly be used to expand the delivery format of current pedagogies, but a more exciting question is how they can be leveraged to create innovative, enriched, and impactful learning experiences. With thoughtful design, the Internet and other technologies can help educators overcome the limitations of some traditional IB pedagogies. For example, in teaching case studies, we can incorporate virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) tools to create immersion programs to provide visually vivid information about companies, consumers, markets, and countries. We can enhance cross-cultural communication skills through the immersive experience created by VR and AR. We can also utilize social media streaming and teleconference tools to craft effective virtual abroad experiences as a lower-cost alternative to study-abroad trips (e.g., Granot et al. 2021).

Another important area of pedagogy improvement deals with IB students’ professional development during their tenure in college. Compared with other business subjects, international business majors may have less access to traditional internship and professional development opportunities within the local or domestic market that can allow them to practice and apply their core skill sets directly. While international internships are great for professional development, the opportunities are limited due to the intensive resources required from both students and schools (Hermann, Amaral, and Bonzanini Bossle 2021). Therefore, creating new and innovative partnerships and pedagogical designs to prepare students for IB jobs is essential. IB educators can seek collaborations with a wider range of organizations rather than traditional internship training to expose students to various business issues and solutions at the international level. For example, we can leverage partnerships with international nonprofit organizations and social enterprises to enhance professional development training through pedagogical designs such as simulations, service learning, and experiential learning projects.

As always, JTIB is dedicated to fostering conversations and opinion exchanges to support the continuous improvements in IB pedagogies. It’s important to note that creative pedagogical changes would not be valid or directional without evidence of improved student learning outcomes. Therefore, we highly welcome more papers that provide outcome-based formal comparisons and evaluations of innovative teaching methods with traditional IB pedagogies and shed light on future pedagogic improvements. We need evidence-based papers on innovative and less expensive IB teaching pedagogies.

2. Introducing this issue

This issue of JTIB features four articles on improving IB pedagogies varying from simulation to global virtual teams and global citizenship education. These papers are small initial steps in our quest.

The first article, titled “The Impact of Experiential Learning and the Use of Digital Platforms on Global Virtual Teams’ Motivation” by Emil Velinov of Škoda Auto University and Juergen Bleicher of Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, sheds light on the impact of the experiential learning process and usage of digital technologies through a global virtual project involving universities across five countries. The study focuses on how technology involved in the learning-teaching process at different business schools has affected the experiential learning of undergraduates and graduates in the digital era. Furthermore, the paper discusses how the global virtual collaboration of students has increased engagement in their studies. The paper is based on an experiential study involving almost 140 students participating in global virtual collaboration via different digital platforms in classes on International Business and Cross-Cultural Management. The study results show that with computer-supported collaborative learning, students across all involved universities have been highly committed and motivated in conducting their tasks. The paper shows that the implementation and use of digital platforms in face-to-face and online classes on International Business and Cross-Cultural Management within this virtual collaboration has provided the students with new knowledge and has held motivation high throughout the project.

The second article, titled “Integrating Explicit Political Costs into a World Trade Organization Negotiation Simulation” by Andres Gallo of University of North Florida and Jeffrey Steagall of Weber State University, enriches the existing set of global trade negotiation simulations by incorporating explicit, country-specific domestic political costs incurred from trade concessions. Several semesters of testing with undergraduate students in the U.S. and master’s students in Argentina demonstrate that the simulation significantly enhances students’ understanding of the role that domestic political pressures play in preventing negotiators from reaching the first-best trade regime. The simulation also provides students with realistic, current economic values for the country and the world from freeing trade. A complete instructor’s manual with a detailed description of how to use the simulation, all student handouts and an Excel file that automatically calculates point totals is available via e-mail from the corresponding author.

The third article, titled “Review of the Last Decade of Global Citizenship among Students: Exploratory Note and a Unified Framework” by Nikolaos Misirlis of HAN University of Applied Sciences, provides valuable insights for researchers seeking to build their knowledge base in the field of education, particularly for those interested in international business schools and the concept of global citizenship. The findings of this literature review have the potential to inform new teaching methods for academics and educators, while also helping students understand and approach the world in a more informed and conscientious manner.

As in the past, we hope you enjoy reading this issue and that you find it thought-provoking – perhaps even giving you ideas to improve your own teaching. We would appreciate hearing your comments on this issue.

Raj Aggarwal, Editor

Yinglu Wu, Assistant Editor

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raj Aggarwal

Raj Aggarwal, PhD, CFA, is Member of the Boards of the Kent State University Foundation and Ideastream Public Media, and the Sullivan Professor of International Business and Finance Emeritus and the former Business Dean at the University of Akron, USA. He is or has also been a Board Member of corporations, mutual funds, and nonprofit organizations. He is a past editor of Financial Practice and Education, a Finance and Accounting area editor of the Journal of International Business Studies, and the current Editor of the Journal of Teaching in International Business. He is a Fellow and a former VP. and the annual meeting program chair of the Academy of International Business. Aggarwal has been a Fulbright Research Scholar to Southeast Asia and the winner of a Larosier award on the best essay on International Finance at the Prague 2000 joint meetings of the World Bank and the IMF. He has won many other awards for outstanding teaching and scholarship. Raj Aggarwal is the author of twelve books and over a hundred scholarly publications and is in the top one-third of a percent among SSRN authors ranked by downloads and has over 10,000 Google Scholar citations with a h-index of over 50, and an I-10 index of over 150. He is included in the Research.com list of the top 1% of scholars in Economics and Finance globally and in the Nature/Stanford University Global List of the Top 2% of the Worlds Scientists in terms of impact on their field.

Yinglu Wu

Yinglu Wu, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Boler College of Business, John Carroll University, USA. Her recent publications include articles in Journal of Interactive Marketing, Decision Support Systems, Journal of Macromarketing, and Journal of Teaching in International Business. She is the Assistant and Managing Editor of the Journal of Teaching in International Business.