Web assignment contributes to Kazakhstan’s economic plans

“The class offers practical tools and instruments to use the value chain concept for real life industry analysis.” – Yerbol Orynbayev, CEO of the Center for Marketing and Analytical Research in Kazakhstan

Instead of assigning a final paper in his Organizations and Global Competitiveness course, Duke Professor Gary Gereffi has teams of students develop Web sites that analyze global industries. In a 2001 paper on Teaching Website Design in Business Classes, Gereffi explained the assignment’s goals: “integrate theory and empirical research … create, analyze and present information for a general audience (and) develop teamwork skills.” When he first gave the assignment in 2000, he never dreamed these projects might influence international policy. But they have.

Yerbol Orynbayev, a native of Kazakhstan, was a Public Policy graduate student at Duke in 2002 when he took Gereffi’s course and helped create the Vegetable Oil Industry Web site pictured below as part of an online report for Professor Gary Gereffi’s Organizations and Global Competitiveness course.

Orynbayev was so impressed with the course, that when he returned to Kazakhstan and became the country’s deputy minister for economy and budget planning, he asked Gereffi to travel to Kazakhstan during his sabbatical to help implement the country’s new economic strategy. Gereffi agreed and, as part of that work, taught a short course on industry analysis to Kazakh businessmen and government officials.

At the end of that course, the participants turned in PowerPoint presentations (similar to the Duke students’ Web sites) that analyzed various industries in Kazakhstan and proposed economic development plans. Below are two examples: Electric Power in the Oil and Gas Sector of Kazakhstan and Pipe Line Value Chain & Pipe Market Analysis.

“[Gereffi’s] class offers practical tools and instruments to use the value chain concept for real-life industry analysis,” says Orynbayev, now the CEO of the Center for Marketing and Analytical Research in Kazakhstan. “The Web site assignment is a salient example of such an instrument.”

Challenging students to create a Web site with up-to-date industry analysis “gets them into this research mode,” Gereffi says. “You’re not just absorbing material that the instructor is giving you, but you’re creating resources that can actually be useful to people.”

Support for Gereffi’s global industry Web site assignment came from Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) and a GE Foundation grant. For more examples of technology being used in the classroom at Duke, see CIT’s project examples.