UMUC alumna Ruth Nansanje Kirinda '98 offers a perfect example. Some of her earliest contacts included Uganda's National Water and Sewerage and the Uganda Electricity Board, as well as multinational corporations like Shell Oil and consulting firms like Ernst and Young. Instead, we look toward creating a global organization, one that can do business anywhere, that can leverage the advantages of various markets while dealing with the cultural issues that come from having personnel in 12 different countries and time zones. The issues are very different. Learning to create such an organization is much easier said than done, of course, and the reality of nurturing, in students, the skills needed to create or contribute to that sort of entity is a constant challenge.
Understanding starts to shift.
The fact that higher education in the United States is, at the same time, itself being shaped by the forces of globalization only makes the equation more complex. It is not uncommon for one of our classes to include a student from Moscow, from Saudi Arabia, and from Okinawa. That's just an example, and it's probably realistic to throw in somebody from Buenos Aires and Kansas, as well. We have American instructors teaching in some 200 locations around the world, and we have instructors from those regions teaching for us as well. Through online education, we can also bring faculty members living abroad, with their unique perspectives and expertise, to students everywhere.