“German Association or Chinese Emperor?”
Building COINs Between China and Germany
Yang Song1, Matthäus P. Zylka2, Peter A. Gloor3
1

Jilin University, China, 2University of Bamberg, Germany, 3MIT CCI, USA

Abstract This paper describes our experience teaching a distributed virtual
course with teams made up by students from China and Germany. It is based on a
distributed course about Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) which has
been successfully taught for the last twelve years to students from Germany, theUS, Finland, and Switzerland. In this course, students form teams from different
locations and languages, and together complete a complex project analyzing
online social media. In 2016-2017, we applied the same course framework toparticipants from China and Germany. To gather insights from the course, we
follow a mixed method study design by analyzing qualitative interviews withcourse participants and quantitative communication data of course participants.
We find that combining members from China and Germany into the same teamposes a set of unique intercultural challenges, overcoming language andbehavioral differences. We present key lessons learned to inform future courses
combining participants from the East and the West.

1 Introduction
In the age of globalization, understanding and learning from cultural diversity
is important for scholars and practitioners the like. People who work with
culturally different colleagues need to know the cultures with which they areinteracting and must appreciate their intercultural colleagues’ natures, skills,
experiences and behaviors. Rising dependence on intercultural teams in themodern workplace calls for growth in understanding of working andcommunication processes necessary to develop well-performing teams. To
improve this understanding, numerous studies were published in the context ofintercultural issues in global teams in the past years (e.g. Connaughton andMarrisa, 2007; Gloor et al. 2013, 2016; Krishna et al. 2004; Nicholson & Sahay,
2001; Ochieng & Price, 2010, Stahl et al. 2010). This paper contributes to thisresearch on work and communication in intercultural teams by presenting therecent experiences we made in teaching an intercultural course on Collaborative
Innovation Networks (COINs). This paper describes the extension of an2intercultural course on COINs, where students from different countries work
together and innovate as distributed virtual teams. They solve complex social
media analysis problems, coolhunting for trends and trendsetters on the Internet,
doing prediction based on social media archives, or developing new tools foranalyzing communication and collaboration. In addition, this is the first time wemix the East and West students together remotely, our experiences and teaching
method will provide insights for further collaborations for Eastern and Western
universities. We will provide more opportunities for students from the East to
have an international studying experience without having to go abroad.

2 COINs Course Overview
The basic framework of the course has been developed and fine-tuned overtwelve years with participants from different European countries, and universities
in the US such as MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), SCAD (SavannahCollege of Art and Design), and IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology). The course
consists of an introductory block course, where the basics of the method aretaught, and a 3-month project part where students form distributed teams. The
teaming process is by now well established, with bi-weekly checkpoints, where all
student teams have to present to the plenary in class, with the different classroom
connected by Web conferencing. These mandatory checkpoints are complemented
by at least once-per-week fixed-time meetings where participants from thedifferent locations are meeting face-to-face using Skype or another Web
conferencing tools such as WeChat. As part of the course, students also use thesocial media analysis tool Condor (Gloor 2017), which automatically analyses all
types of online communication archives such as e-mail, Twitter, Wikipedia,
Facebook, and blogs. We put big emphasis on pro-active communication,encouraging students to be upfront and tell their team members as soon as it
becomes obvious to them that they can not deliver a milestone at the agreed-on
time.
There is now also a detailed course manuscript available with detailed step-bystep instructions for the students, both describing the theoretical foundations aswell as the technical aspects of the Condor tool which is used for online social
media analysis (Gloor 2017).
In an increasingly global world, working in distributed virtual teams becomes a
crucial capability. While this capability has been taught in previous versions of theCOINs course mostly for mixed German-US teams, China is becoming an
increasingly active participant in the global economy. Improving theinternationalization level of a Chinese university is one of the critical requirements
for future high-level Chinese universities. Opportunities to build bridges between
the East and West are thus getting more and more important. We therefore, in
winter 2016, extended the COINs course for the first time with participants from
Jilin University, Changchun, China. Teams consisted of four to seven members,

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where always at least two students had to be from both Germany and from China.
They were all Masters’ students; their majors were in business informatics,
computer science, economics, and digital humanities. At the universities
participating in Germany, University of Cologne and University of Bamberg, thiscourse has been well established over the last eleven years, with the students
knowing what to expect, and a large group of alumni who assist newcomers in thecourse. For the Chinese students, it was their first experience collaborating with
Western peers, also they had no cohort of previous-year colleagues to ask
questions for second-level support. The course included 27 students from China
and 30 students from Germany working in 9 different teams on tasks such as
developing a smartwatch-based “happimeter”, and coolhunting about sports,
political trends, diseases, and sustainability.

3 Methods
To analyze the success of this year’s course, we followed a triangulation
multilevel mixed method study design (Creswell et al. 2003). Therefore, wecollected different types of data to represent the different levels of analysis within
the course with the intent of forming an overall interpretation of the course
performance. In detail, we conducted interviews with 11 students (out of 57
participants) from Germany and China after the course was finished, allowing us
to get a representative subset of the student population. During the interview,
students were asked about their experiences working and communicating in a
globally distributed multi-disciplinary group by listing their biggest challenges
and successes in teamwork and project tasks. They were also asked about
intercultural problems and issues, as well as about the communication tools andmeeting frequency. In a second interview part, they were asked about the mostvaluable lessons they had learned during the course regarding working in
multicultural virtual teams, and what they would do differently next time. In theend, we also asked them for suggestions on how to improve the course.
Further, we did a social network analysis of the e-mail archive of the e-mailcommunication among course participants. This archive was collected by asking
the students to cc all their mails to dummy mailboxes, which were at the end of
the course analyzed with the dynamic semantic social network analysis tool
Condor (Gloor 2017).

4 Interview Results
We conducted a total of 11 interviews, with 4 German, and 7 Chinese students.
During the course, we also got feedbacks about collaboration and communication
issues mostly from German students. This already illustrates the key different in

4culture, with the Germans being pro-active, and telling the Chinese what to do,
and the Chinese much more passive, waiting for instructions. This is also one of
the typical characteristics of Chinese students as most of the courses are given to alarge group (above 100 students). In general, we found that compared to previous
years, where the background of the participants was more homogeneous andfirmly embedded in Western culture, this year’s course was much morechallenging. As the most positive lesson from the course, the students appreciatedthe opportunity to learn about working together with team members from radicallydifferent cultures. They noticed that in the beginning they had misunderstandings
because of different cultural contexts and language issues, which they learned tocope with over the duration of the course. Students also noticed the crucial role offace-to-face communication in Skype to work out misunderstanding arising in emails.
Chinese/German teamwork was supported by similarities in culture that
supported collaboration – for instance, the attitude towards being reliable andpredictable in German and Chinese culture is similar, and people were on time forvirtual meetings, and they also mostly delivered on promises made to their teammembers. For instance, the Chinese students appreciated what they called the“rigorous attitude” of the Germans: “I feel the rigorous attitude of the Germans
which is deserved learning”- Chinese student 6.
They also felt that the Germans were more pro-active with regards toinnovation, and were impressed by their willingness to try out new ideas anddeviate from the well-trodden paths. The students in China and Germany also
appreciated the opportunity to make new friends from a different culture, whomthey would not have a chance to meet otherwise. The students were appreciativeof the efforts of the teachers, who made themselves available and approachable.
“From the course, I learnt the knowledge about social network and the mostvaluable thing is how to cooperate with others”- Chinese student 1.
“The project offers us a chance to communicate with foreign students which
has great significance”- Chinese student 1.
“There are some communication challenges, but I didn’t feel the culturaldifferences”- Chinese student 2.
“Cooperation with foreign friends is completely different. We need to learn tolearn from others”- Chinese student 2.
“Our foreign teammates have a high efficiency all the time which is somethingalso we should learn. In the meantime, they have a strong logic when they doanything”-Chinese student 2.
One main difference between the German and Chinese students was theirattitude towards leadership. While the Germans were – in the spirit of COINs –working in self-organizing sub teams, the Chinese were looking for a strong
leader:“I think we need a leader as a team. Each team needs a leader to organize
everyone to meet, and division of labor, so that everyone can participate in thisevent. A rudderless team will reduce efficiency”, according to Chinese student 3.

5“Our Chinese colleagues were much more observing. Sometimes we were notsure if they understood everything or listening. We were talking like all the time.
We have some people in our group who would like to talk as well. Sometimes wedidn’t know if our colleagues in Jilin did understand everything or felt confident
to ask something. They were very quiet. But they also did a good job.” - German
student 1“German students always say: “we want to do”. Chinese students are notsaying what they want to do, they are waiting to be assigned. This got better overtime.” - German student 2
All the team projects were chosen based on the mutual interests of students.
There were two teams working on the same task, one team with an appointed
project manager (a German student) whose sole task it was to manage the team,the other with three informal leaders (two Germans, one Chinese) who took turns
depending on skills and tasks. We evaluated the final project paper, the team withrotating leadership far outperformed the team with the rigid leadership structure.
In the interviews of both Chinese and German students a list of problems wasbrought up: The English language skills of the Chinese students were quite varied.
While some students spoke and wrote excellent English, the English language
capabilities of many Chinese students were rudimentary, which madecommunication extremely challenging. This is also because most of the university
courses are given in Chinese. The percentage of English speaking students is very
low. Therefore, Chinese students have no chance to use their English skills. Our
course provides an opportunity for Chinese students to communicate withinternational students at no costs for students who are not able to study abroad.
The Chinese students encountered technology problems doing the Web analysis
for the Coolhunting projects, which were chosen by most of the teams. This isbecause our course involves more social science students than computer scienceand engineering students. Coolhunting projects are more relevant for social
science students. In particular, for those students, there were two technicalproblems, (1) Internet connectivity and (2) Chinese language support. The Chinese
students had connectivity issues because of restricted Internet access in China to
Twitter, Facebook and Google search, which form the backbone of analysis fordoing social media coolhunting projects in Germany and the US. While there areother systems in China, such as Baidu, and Sina Weibo, there would still be a lotof Internet content in Chinese available in Twitter and Facebook, but the “great
firewall” blocked this access for automated data collection with Condor. The
second issue was the missing Chinese natural language processing capabilities of
the Condor tool (which only supports Western languages such as English,
German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese). In the end, Condor was thecoolhunting tool predominantly used by the German students. The Chinese
students ended up using simpler Chinese tools such as manual searches with
Baidu, and directly collecting data from Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of
Twitter.
There were also technology problems in video conferencing between China andGermany, and one instructor frequently participating from the US. We started

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using Adobe Connect, hosted on a server in Germany. In the beginning, we had
big connectivity issues, and so we started experimenting with WebEx and Skype,however we found that using the right settings, and asking for a high-speed
connection at Jilin University solved these issues. In the second half of thesemester Adobe Connect provided a satisfactory teleconferencing experience.
Despite these obstacles, the overall assessment of the students was quite
positive, and they recommended keeping this seminar as a regular offering in the
future:“We liked”…”the method of collecting foreign data. The precious experienceof communicating with foreign friends is also valuable.” - Chinese student 4.
“This teaching method is novel, it can be in line with international standards,
so that we broaden our horizons.” - Chinese student 5.

5 Knowledge Flow Analysis Through E-Mail
In addition to the interviews, we also did an e-mail based social network
analysis with Condor. During the teamwork phase of the course, all students wereasked to cc their e-mail communication to a different e-mail address per team,which was then collected for analysis with Condor. Figure 1 illustrates the e-mailactivity over time, peaks in activity before each bi-weekly in-class meeting areclearly noticeable. This nicely illustrates the need for these meetings, because
otherwise students would defer all work to the end of the course.
Fig. 1. Activity of E-Mail over time

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Figure 2 illustrates the sentiment, complexity, and emotionality of the e-mailcontent. Sentiment (the blue line in figure 2) is positive and above 0.5 most of thetime. Sentiment of 0.5 would denote neutral language, values below 0.5 denotenegative sentiment. We find that right before Christmas sentiment drops
somewhat to 0.4, which might be because of coordination problems between
Germans and Chinese students during the vacation time. At the same time,emotionality (the green line) is jumping up, illustrating the same more emotionallycharged discussion style. Complexity (the yellow line) is quite high, illustrating
the complex technical topics discussed by the different teams. Complexity ismeasured as the probability of distinctive words in individual messages comparedto the occurrence of these words in all other messages (Gloor 2017). Emotionality(the green line) is measured as standard deviation of sentiment.
Fig. 2. Sentiment, emotionality, and complexity over time

Figure 3 illustrates the word cloud, most words are in green, denoting thepositive context of the words. Only words such as “problem”, or “app”, which was
the product of one of the teams, are shown in red, indicating negative sentiment.
The most popular words were “presentation”, “meeting”, “time”, and “peter”, thefirst name of one of the instructors. This illustrates that students were working
from one bi-weekly presentation to the next, and discussing who would bepresenting next at the meeting.

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Fig. 3. Word cloud of contents, the greener the text, the more positive is the context of a word

Figure 4 shows the social network, constructed by the e-mails exchanged
among the students and instructors. Nodes are colored by location. We find that
the German students (in green) are closer to the center and the instructors (inblue), indicating the more pro-active communication style of the Germans. The
Chinese students (in orange) are all much more peripheral. The nodes are sized byinfluence as calculated by Condor. Condor measures influence by tracking who
introduces a new word first, and who picks up this word next. We find the German
members of one team, which was building a smartwatch based communicationtracking system to calculate happiness of wearers of the smartwatch, to be mostinfluential. As the students are from very different fields, for each team, the topic
they chose was also very different, most of the students prefer to work as a teaminstead of communicating with other teams. However, during our interview tostudents, they would like to communicate with the teams that have a similar topic.

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Fig. 4. Social network of class, node size by influence

Figure 5 illustrates the temporal social surface. In this representation, the x-axis
shows the different people, the y-axis shows time, and the z-axis shows
betweenness centrality of each person. The more this picture looks like a “stormysea”, with changing betweenness curves for each person, the more creative is thegroup. In figure 5 we see four major spikes. The first one, in the back, shows thecentral role of the main instructor (Peter) in kicking of the course, by exchanging
e-mails with many different students. The second spike illustrates the first biweekly project status meeting, where again Peter is exchanging e-mails with manydifferent students. After this initial phase, the communication becomes much more
decentralized, with many different students assuming leadership roles, resulting inmany smaller spikes over the rest of the course.

10Fig. 5. Temporal Social Surface

Project Start – Peter pushes teams

1st presenta2on – Peter pushes teams

Teamwork takes overTeams coordinate internally

Figure 6 illustrates the contribution index, which shows how pro-active aparticipant is. Each dot in figure 6 is a person, the farther to the right a person is,
the more she sends or receives e-mail messages. The higher up the person, themore she sends. If a dot is at the top (y=1), she only sends e-mails, if she is at thebottom (y=-1), she only receives e-mails. The large red oval illustrates the sameteam 9 as discussed in figure 4. We find that the German students in team 9 (thegreen dots) are the most active participants in the course, sending the most emails. We also find that the yellow dots (the Chinese students) are more passive,as they are farther to the left, and farther down, than the German students,
confirming our findings from the interviews.

11Fig. 6. Contribution index

Green: germany
Yellow: chineseOrange: instructors

6 Lessons Learned and Conclusion
While we still have much to improve, we found the existing COINs course
framework robust enough to teach distributed virtual teamwork to participantsfrom cultures as different as Germany and China. Table 1 below lists our key
insights.

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Table 1. Key Lessons learned

Issue
English language skills
Passive work style ofChineseLong-distance project
management
Self-organizing work styleof Germans
Non-aligned holidays

Not loosing face
Attitude towards paper
writing

Recommendation
Make it crystal clear that English language skills
are a prerequisite (particularly in China)
Constantly encourage Chinese to ask questions
and speak up
Encourage students to have clear deliverables foreach milestone for each student
Encourage them to allocate tasks to Chinese
students
Encourage students to share their mutual holidays(e.g. Chinese New Year, Western New Year,
Carnival in Cologne)
Encourage students to ask questions and informtheir peers about what they do not know
Make it very clear the copying text from theInternet for the final paper is plagiarism.

Even though we found that the Chinese students were more passive during thecollaboration phase of the project, most of the Chinese students gave positive
feedback about the course. Based on interviews with the students, they wereattracted by the novelty of the framework of the course, which was totally new tothem. First, most of the classes in Jilin University are given in Chinese, there are
only 4% courses are given in English. Second, the university is collaborating witha large number of international universities. However, the students haven’t gotten
enough chances to work with international students yet. Thirdly, the students havenever collaborated with another international university through virtual meetings.
Finally, most of the Chinese students are used to sitting in a class and passively
listening to the lecturers’ presentation. The learning efficiency is very low. This
teaching method requires the students to work together in a team, which
drastically improved their productivity.
While the goals of the team projects were challenging, students were motivatedto finish their assignments, as they did not want to “loose face”. During thelearning process, most of the Chinese students reported that they learned new
behavior and processes never experienced before. First, as the course is based oninternational collaboration, Chinese students were forced to present to the wholegroup every other week through virtual meetings. To prepare their presentation,
they needed to communicate with each other occasionally. Secondly, they learned
a lot from the German students such as their working attitude and time
management. “It is a good opportunity for us to do a work with the students froma different cultural background although there are many challenges. We can learn
many things from our teammates, such as the way of thesis writing. The students
form Germany has high efficiency but are also a little stubborn…”, according to13Chinese student 3. Chinese students are used to be “assigned” and keep “silent”.
After experiencing the course, they became more critical than they used to be andstarted expressing their own opinions. Thirdly, most Chinese students are good atEnglish exams rather than using English as a language for communication. The
course provides students an opportunity to break the wall between Chinese andGerman students. They had to find a solution to communicate with each otherfirst.
As for German students, they were surprised by the much more passive initialattitude of the Chinese students. As German behavior is more pro-active, they
ended up assigning the team tasks to individuals and coordinating the projects.
Also, as on average they had better English skills, they ended up writing most of
the final papers. There were two main reasons why the Chinese students
contributed very little to writing the final papers: (1) their English skills were notsufficient to write a scientific paper, and (2) they did not get enough credit fromtheir university to invest large amounts of time into writing the final papers.
While the German students expressed some frustration, their overall assessment
was quite positive, as they reported a unique experience not possible otherwise. To
close with a quote from a German student: “Overall, the project was an amazing
experience, and over long periods of teamwork we had a lot of fun interactingwith our Chinese colleagues.” – German student 2.
In response to what we have learned from the fall semester course described inthis paper, we improved our teaching methodology in the spring semester for both
Chinese and German students. In the new COINs course, the local instructor asked
the Chinese students to take the initiative in the team meetings. The preliminary
results show that the Chinese students can be more active when being guided. The
quality of team communication has also been improved. The local lecturer hasreported to the university to change the general regulation so the Chinese students
can be motivated to take a more active part in the team projects in the future. We
therefore think that this course framework provides a unique learning environment
to both students from East and West.

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