Enriching Global Marketing Education with Virtual Classrooms: An Effectiveness Study

Global marketing education is embedded in an increasingly global high-tech business environment. Business practices and marketing education are strongly influenced by these developments. New technologies are successfully implemented in university curricula to improve the effectiveness of teaching and the cooperation between universities in management teaching. This paper deals with the usage and effectiveness of virtual classrooms in the global marketing curriculum and empirically investigates the antecedents of successful teaching in such an environment. The investigation is based on case teaching endeavors connecting up to three university classrooms in various countries. All together, some 90 students participated in the joint teaching sessions. The study presented was conducted in four countries (China, France, Spain and Austria) over a one-year period. The results of the research indicates that instructor empathy and classroom interaction have the highest impact on teaching effectiveness in the virtual classroom.