Ranked #1 in the World
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By Oseas Ramirez Assad, Thunderbird MBA Student
A project to improve education in Mexico received the attention of scholars from all over the world March 26-29, 2010, when the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) invited me to present my enterprise at a Fulbright enrichment seminar in Rhode Island.
This event allowed me to tie together the three most important aspects of my professional life: being an entrepreneur, a Thunderbird and a Fulbright Scholar.
Fulbright and Thunderbird
The United States contains many undergraduate and graduate programs that rank among the best in the world. Among these countless programs and institutions, Fulbright and Thunderbird stand out for their traditions of excellence.
Although Fulbright is an exchange program and Thunderbird is a business school, both share many commonalities.
They both were founded at the end of World War II in 1946 in response to the horrors of the war. Both initiatives promoted education as a means to ensure that such large-scale conflict would never happen again.
Thunderbird focuses on commerce education because “borders frequented by trade seldom need soldiers.” That was the assessment of the school’s second president, William Schurz.
U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright summed up the Fulbright philosophy in similar terms. “The simple purpose of the exchange program … is to erode the culturally rooted mistrust that sets nations against one another,” he said.
Both enterprises have flourished over the decades. One of many proofs of Fulbright’s success is the 40 program alumni who are Nobel Prize laureates, so far. Thunderbird, meanwhile, continues to earn No. 1 rankings for international business.
Both enterprises were born with a global DNA, and their mission statements vow to reach out to other countries. Testament to this is the growing network of Fulbright and Thunderbird alumni from more than 150 countries.
Although Fulbright supports a broader range of programs than Thunderbird, which specializes in management education, both enterprises produce graduates from diverse backgrounds and walks of life.
Since the 2000-01 academic year, Thunderbird has attracted 22 Fulbright scholars from different parts of the world. Perhaps the most prominent Fulbright at Thunderbird is our very own president, Ángel Cabrera, Ph.D., who comes from Spain.
Thunderbird also has recently recruited Fulbright scholars from Jordan, Peru, Estonia, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Mexico, Vietnam and the United States.
Networking in Rhode Island
Each year ECA organizes Fulbright Enrichment Seminars that bring together students and alumni to address different issues.
Most recently, I was invited to participate in Providence, Rhode Island, at a seminar called “Global Challenges, Local Solutions: Fostering Change Through Social Entrepreneurship.”
Overall, we had more than 140 Fulbright scholars from every academic discipline imaginable, coming from more than 70 countries. Being a Thunderbird, I felt pretty much at home.
We attended conferences and discussion panels with social entrepreneurs in health care and education. We also participated in an ongoing workshop with the objective to analyze and propose a viable business alternative for a specific social problem in the realm of education, agriculture or health care.
Throughout the three-day event, I represented Mexico on a team that also included members from Mali, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Namibia, Indonesia, the United States, Malaysia, Nigeria and Colombia.
It was just like a team at Thunderbird!
The professional diversity on the team was also impressive. We had a lawyer, a linguist, an anthropologist and a theater play producer, among others.
To make the experience even more exciting for me, I had the privilege to present my own entrepreneurship project in this seminar.
Social entrepreneurship in Mexico
My online consulting company, weknow (www.we-know.net), pursues a social entrepreneurship mission through the integration of technology and education.
I have five years of experience as a family counselor and more than a decade of experience as an information technology consultant. Although a slightly unusual combination, this background laid the foundation for my company and my seminar presentation, entitled “Pedagogy + ICT = Better Education in Developing Countries.”
It all started during 2006, when I was teaching social psychology to college students in Guadalajara, Mexico. Unfortunately, Mexico’s educational system tends to emphasize memorization as opposed to higher cognitive functions.
While teaching, I realized I needed better tools to engage students and make them participate in critical thinking processes.
Going back to my IT days, I realized that Web technologies could provide some of these tools, so I started researching and finally test drove a Learning Management System with my students.
This experience proved to me that Web technologies can dramatically improve educational processes if utilized with sound pedagogical principles. I also discovered this was an interesting business opportunity, so I started a company with the objective of improving education through the use of technology.
I gathered a team of top-notch education and IT specialists and started working. In the four years since then, we have done work with educational institutions on the private and public sectors.
In the public sector we have worked with the Education Department in Jalisco, Mexico, setting up servers and training teachers for online courses expected to impact more than 100,000 users.
In the private low-income sector, we have worked with the second-largest private university in Jalisco, the Universidad Tecnológica de Guadalajara. We provided access at this university to a learning management system.
We also provided pedagogical and technical training to teachers. Our goal at this site is to impact more than 12,000 students.
We also provide more specialized versions of our service to important educational institutions whose greater economic power allows them to pursue even more innovation.
Finally, we have been able to support nonprofit organizations by donating our services.
My favorite case is the World Youth Alliance, a New York-based non-governmental organization with consulting status in the United Nations. This group educates youth worldwide in human rights and dignity.
An interesting fact is that the learning management system we use in all these projects is the same one used at Thunderbird: Moodle.
Moodle is the leading open-source learning management system and is a good match for Thunderbird because it is global, currently being used in more than 150 countries.
This match has given me the opportunity to closely work with the Thunderbird Student Government and administration to collaborate in order to achieve a richer Moodle implementation.
Entrepreneurship, Thunderbird and the Fulbright Program fit together in many ways to make the world a better place. My experience at the recent conference in Rhode Island made this clear.
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