For the final stage of a simulation in my negotiation course, one group of students negotiated with a video hookup to a student who had to be out of town. I hadn’t planned on this experiment (which worked well), but it got me thinking – a dangerous activity, I admit.
For quite a while, faculty have been arranging for their students to negotiate by email with students in other schools and even other countries. I imagine that in real life these days, negotiation by video probably is more common than by email and that it will become even more prevalent as the technology continues to improve.
ODR-ianados probably have catalogued general differences in these communication modes and effects on the process. Obviously, negotiation by video better simulates F2F interaction than email and it would better prepare students for negotiations by video that they may do in practice.
Given the widespread availability of video technology in laptops, simulation by video should be easy to arrange and also to record for analysis and grading. Faculty have been videotaping negotiations for quite a while but having students actually conduct negotiation by video probably is somewhat different.
So if you were thinking about doing an email simulation next year, you might consider doing a video simulation instead.
If you have done simulations by video, or better yet, written about it, please let us know.
I have an online training. The participants connect across the globe to do their role-plays via video chat. They have all expressed how much they enjoy it–one of the main reasons is that they are connecting with someone who has a completely different approach to negotiation and communication.
Hi John, I have an online mediation training course, where participants are paired up with training buddies around the globe, and they conduct their role plays via video. They say it works wonderfully. They enjoy communicating with people from different points of view and approaches.
In DRI’s International Business Negotiation Certificate program (which is designed based on the lessons learned from the Rethinking Negotiation Teaching Project), the students conduct several negotiations with a partner from another part of the world (half of the students begin the course in-residence in Minnesota at Mitchell Hamline and the other half begin at the Central European University in Budapest which attracts students from around the world). For these negotiations, the students “negotiate” for themselves how these negotiations will take place (via Skype, email, or some other means or combination) mirroring what happens in actual international business negotiation. Most opt to do at least one of the negotiations using a more media rich means of negotiating. Ken Fox and I have written about the course and its design in Venturing Home: Implementing Lessons from the Rethinking Negotiation Teaching Project (chapter 4 in Educating Negotiators for a Connected World) http://open.mitchellhamline.edu/dri_press/4/