by Shelley MacDonald, February 2009
Shelley MacDonald lives in Reno, Nevada, and is a Course Developer and Corporate Trainer at International Game Technology where she conducts core skills training, including online facilitator certification workshops. She is also currently earning a Master’s degree in Online Learning from California State University, East Bay. Having lived and worked in both the United States and Europe, one of Shelley’s areas of specialization is intercultural communication and its impact on learning outcomes.
Imagine some of the daunting experiences of students from other cultures when confronted with online courses designed and taught by American instructors: the uncertainty felt by Arab students when challenged with the unfamiliar or with vague explanations, the confusion experienced by Asian students faced with a constructivist individual-centered learning model, or the discomfort of African students when asked to participate in highly participatory distance teams that are not anchored in consensus-based thinking (Germain-Rutherford et al., 2008).
Although it may be argued that ‘cyber-culture’ is reaching across and beyond borders to unite learners around the world in many ways, cultural differences do and will continue to influence perceptions and interpretations of content, presentation, and modes of interaction. Culture has been defined as something that is shared by all or almost all members of a social group, passed on by the older members of the group to the younger members, and consisting of values, morals, laws and customs that shape behavior and structure perceptions of the world (Adler, 1991).
As this shared entity, culture is subject to change, but many firmly-anchored, traditional cultural aspects change only at a very slow, almost glacial, pace and must therefore be taken into consideration by instructors who design and deliver online learning initiatives to multicultural audiences. As instructors who wish to encourage collaborative and inclusive online learning environments with a sense of community, we need to think about how to structure our course content in such a way that it engages students from any and all cultures that we may be dealing with.
There are many, many cultural aspects that can come into play and may need to be taken into consideration. We will briefly consider only four of those myriad aspects: power distance, individualism versus collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and high and low context, the first three of which are taken from the works of Geert Hofstede (Hofstede, 1991) and the last from Edward T. Hall (Hall & Hall, 1989).
Power Distance
Power distance refers to the extent to which less powerful members of a cultural group expect and accept unequal power distribution (Tylee, 2001). People from higher power distance cultures, for example, societies heavily influenced by Confucian philosophy, expect the teacher to be the authority, the master, the expert, and are less likely to question anything that comes from the teacher (Germain-Rutherford et al., 2008). This has ramifications for teachers from lower power distance cultures, such as the U.S., who expect their students to question content analytically and search for and find their own answers and solutions; these instructors may therefore feel their online students from other cultures are not as participatory or analytical as they are expected to be. This cultural dimension can also influence perceptions about who has the right to access what information and the appropriateness of using online technology as a learning tool (Tylee, 2001).
Individualism / Collectivism
According to Hofstede, the United States is the most individualistic culture in the world (Hofstede, 1991). Many people from other cultures tend to be significantly more group-oriented, such as the afore-mentioned Asian students, who are less likely to want to “stand out†from the group in their online interactions. It has been found, for example, that Asian students tend to ask fewer questions in online discussion forums than their North American peers (Germain-Rutherford et al., 2008), and that Westerners tend to focus more on points of disagreement, whereas Asians discuss various points regardless of whether they agree or disagree (Rosé et al., 2007). Similarly, the emphasis on consensus and group participation in collectivistic African cultures can make African students like those mentioned above bring a different understanding of teamwork into the online community than their U.S. counterparts might (Germain-Rutherford et al., 2008). In addition, motivational factors can vary between more individualistic and more collectivistic cultures, whereby people from the former are often strongly motivated by personal achievement and rewards as opposed to people from the latter who are often most concerned about moving the group forward (Tylee, 2001).
Uncertainty Avoidance
Hofstede’s uncertainty avoidance index indicates how comfortable – or not – members of particular cultures tend to be with ambiguous situations. The Arab students mentioned in the opening paragraph are typically much less comfortable with instructions that leave room for interpretation than their North American counterparts, who thrive on choice. Particularly Arab women tend to be concerned about making mistakes or not following norms correctly in electronic discussion groups (Germain-Rutherford et al., 2008).
High / Low Context
In regard to human interactions of any kind, low context cultures tend to rely on the words spoken at any given moment and to be direct and to-the-point (example: the United States). High context cultures rely heavily on implied and embedded messages and are more indirect in their approaches to communication (example: China). Low context online learning typically addresses learning outcomes, student-centered learning, and development of personal skills, whereas high context online learning is more geared to highlighting teaching inputs, uses identical syllabi for all students, and places emphasis on acquiring broad knowledge through hard work on the part of all students according to the norms of the culture. In addition, low context situations demand an ‘efficient’ use of teaching resources of all kinds, while high context situations emphasize developing deep student/teacher relationships (Germain-Rutherford, 2008). As in the other examples of areas of cultural differences, here, too, there is plenty of room for collisions on the way to collaboration in building online learning communities.
We have just made a tiny scratch on the surface of exploring a few of the issues that impact designing and delivering collaborative online learning initiatives to multicultural audiences. Unfortunately, there is still relatively little exchange between the computer-supported educational research communities of Asia, the U.S., and Europe that could give us more information on how multicultural online communities are being built and handled (Rosé et al., 2007); however, if we as instructors keep in mind that “culture is as much embedded in the way the course is delivered, especially in the online environment, as in the content itself†(Wilhelm, 2003), we will hopefully be open and flexible to responding to the varying interpretations and needs of multicultural online learning communities. Ideally, in order to create inclusive communities of collaborative learning, all online training facilitators should foster attitudes of curiosity and openness, make an effort to acquire knowledge of cultural differences, and work at developing skills to forge cross-cultural bridges and to learn to motivate and encourage all online learners, regardless of their cultural backgrounds.
References:
Adler, N. J. (1991). International dimensions of organizational behavior. Boston: PWS-Kent Publishing Company.
Germain-Rutherford, A., Kerr, B. (2008). An inclusive approach to online learning environments: Models and resources. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, v. 9, no. 2.
Hall, E.T., Hall, M. R. (1989). Understanding cultural differences. Yarmouth, Maine: Intercultural Press.
Hofstede, G. (1991). Cultures and organizations: software of the mind. London: McGraw Hill Book Company.
Rosé, C.P., Fischer, F., Chang, C-Y (2007). Exploring the influence of culture on collaborative learning. Retrieved 2/2/09 from Retrieved 2/2/09 from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sfussell/CHI2007/Rose.pdf
Tylee, J. (2001). Cultural issues and the online environment. Retrieved 1/25/09 from http://www.csu.edu.au/division/landt/resources/documents/cultural_issues.pdf
Wihelm, C. (2003). Cultural Factors in the Design of Online Learning. Retrieved 2/2/09 from kn.open.ac.uk/public/getfile.cfm?documentfileid=2673.