UB's e-Business Japanese Course Takes to the Road

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Most Americans doing business in Japan face some unusual obstacles: a language completely unlike their own, complex and apparently inexplicable modes of interaction evolved from ancient traditions and a general lack of familiarity with Japanese culture -- in particular, its business culture.

For business people who need to get up to speed, the University at Buffalo World Languages Institute has announced plans to offer its pioneering online e-Business Japanese program next spring in cooperation with the University of New Orleans Critical Languages Program.

The joint project, which targets business people in the Buffalo and New Orleans areas, will run from Jan. 25 to May 17, 2003.

It will offer four months of training in Japanese language and culture. Most instruction will take place online, although some components will take place on the campus of the two universities.

Mark Ashwill, director of the UB institute, is creator of e-Business Japanese.

"It offers program participants the opportunity to acquire basic conversational skills and develop the intercultural competence necessary to interact successfully with Japanese colleagues here and abroad," Ashwill explained.

The course, a hybrid form of distance learning, combines the best of low- and high-tech in pursuit of its goals. It was offered for the first time last year to business people from the Buffalo area who gave it rave reviews.

The program makes extensive use of the Internet as an information resource, a means of disseminating course-related material in text and digital form, and as a communication forum. It uses the online, state-of-the-art course delivery system, Blackboard(tm), which is both multimedia and interactive.

Students also use a language textbook with an accompanying software program that address the general and business cultures of Japan, and a telephone-tutoring system that requires them to complete "call-in" assignments to an 800 number on a weekly basis.

"Since most of the course is Web-based and therefore not constrained by time and physical space, participants can be from anywhere in the country," says Ashwill.

Wherever they are, he says that between online work, reading and call-in assignments, they will devote an estimated 160 hours to the course.

While most of the work will be done online, participants will meet personally in workshops held on campus at the beginning of the program, after each unit of study is completed, and at the end of the program.

The workshops will take place at the University of New Orleans and UB.

"This is our first attempt to market the program outside of the Western New York region," Ashwill says. "This type of partnership allows us to offer the program locally while involving colleagues from around the country in its ongoing development.

"Hypothetically, people from many cities, thousands of miles apart can participate in an e-Business Japanese program at the same time, so it is both convenient and cost effective. In fact, we're working on possible partnerships with institutions in metropolitan New York and on the West Coast," he says.

The primary instructor for the UB-UNO course will be Akemi Sakamoto-Isselbaecher, a veteran teacher of Japanese and a doctoral candidate in Learning and Instruction at UB. Sakamoto-Isselbaecher will be assisted by Shiho Igano, an undergraduate major in computer science, who works as a telephone tutor and technical assistant.

Interested parties can register by contacting the UB World Languages Institute at 716-645-2292, or logging on to the program's Web site at: http://wings.buffalo.edu/world-languages/e-jpn.