First we studied culture. There were different definitions of the
culture and I learned that even culture based categorization should be avoided.
Everyone is unique, but everyone still bears cultural signature. It is necessary
for a teacher to understand the culture in order to support learning in an
optimal way since culture is present everywhere. Teacher needs to understand
own cultural background too. That way own comfort zone and limits are easier to
recognize and it will help to understand others too. I liked the following
definition of culture: “I think that the first and most important lesson of
culture is that it belongs to the people, it belongs to us, it is what we make,
and we have tools now more than ever than we did in the past to make culture”
(Downes, 2012). According to the definition the culture is up to people and culture
can change and be different. I think this is important notion especially in the
virtual world. One person can also belong to different cultures depending on
the group (s)he belongs to.
There are concerns for a reason that the lack of face-to-face
communication makes intercultural communication difficult and that may result
ineffectivity in online education (Hannon & D’Netto, 2007.) I believe this
is one of the reasons why traditional way of teaching has to change in online
community. Online education needs different planning and implementation
compared to f2f implementation. Online education can be successful if the
learners’ communication and knowledge sharing is supported and implemented to
be an essential part of online education. Based on my own experience as a
learner, I agree that online culture is negotiated assuming that there has been
a space for communication and sharing. I believe it´s important to let the
learners communicate and participate for culture creation.
I agree with the statement that the traditional, teacher-centered and
content-driven learning culture does not produce learning that is needed today.
It is crucial to develop learning designs that allow dialogue, reflection and
collaboration. That will create a solid starting-point for the group to
collaboratively create a multicultural learning culture. (Teräs, Leppisaari,
Teräs & Herrington, 2012.) It´s important that a group gets a chance for a
trust building between its members, and a real collaborative team can be
formed. It can be enough that members have the open attitude and just assume
the trustworthiness of others. Working life and our informal life is ahead of
education in this culture change.
In this course I familiarized myself to authentic e-learning framework.
To me it gave a good advice how the student-centered and active learning culture
can be developed. The emphasis is on the collaborative completion of realistic
artifacts, similar to those that people would do in real-world professional
situations. It means that a shared culture of both the context and the product
must be developed by students as they engage with the task. (Teräs, H., Leppisaari, I., Teräs, M. & Herrington, J. (2012, pp.
29-36). Authentic learning has also
a strong emphasis on peer learning, a given task is done in groups rather than
individually. Authentic e-learning framework was new to me, but it seemed to be
a very reasonable way to plan an e-learning course.
I planned as my development task an authentic e-learning course where the
main question for learners is: What would be the sustainable way of living for
an individual? I planned that students work in groups and there will be several
weeks’ time to solve the question. Groups will plan their work and agree themselves
the areas of the sustainability that are covered and will have their own online
discussion forums for working together. Groups will write a diary (blog) about
the work done and discussions around the topic. Other groups then read and
comment diary. Teacher suggests a wide range of online resources for learner´s
about the subject. There will be e.g. digital libraries, articles from
magazines, interviews of experts, book chapters, videos, statistics and other
web sites. Also experts working in this area will help students online and
other resources defined by students can be used. End product of the course will
be an article which is then published in the school magazine. The evaluation of
the course will happen based on the article and group work (activities during
the work). The assessment criteria have been agreed together before the work.
It came evident that when planning the course, it´s important to
consider learning culture. It will form a basis to the whole learning process. Aim
for my development task course is that multicultural authentic learning culture
will be created in teams. Learning culture creation is possible when teams work
collaboratively being positively dependent on each other. The nine elements of
authentic e-learning support the culture understanding and creation. Learning
communities including access to expert thinking with group and individual
reflections support the culture creation. Online teachers need to have cultural
sensitivity, and cross cultural competencies are specially needed in online
learning environment. Teachers should be able to provide extra support to the
international students to help their learning experience. Also students could
need some culture and way of working orientation in the beginning of a course.
I learned that multicultural online courses should be planned to be
flexible and variable that they could meet the diversified needs of learners. Online
teacher could conduct pre analysis if possible in order to get an understanding
of the learners´ expectations and cultural backgrounds. That could help the
teacher to adjust the diversity of the course. Despite the demanding
implementation, the attitude towards multicultural courses is very positive.
This is the direction where learning is going and it´s worthwhile to learn to
do effective multicultural online learning courses. It can be a challenging
work for the teacher at the beginning.
I familiarized to different pedagogic approaches and understood that
there is no single answer how to do multicultural online teaching. Anyway it´s clear
that the role of the teacher is changing. Focus changes from teacher-centered
to student-centered education. Teacher´s new role can be more like a
facilitator role or it can be even the same as student role is. The change of
the teachers´ role is evident especially in the e-learning environment where
different cultures and learning styles meet. Learners’ diversity will grow, and
education needs to be flexible to meet the different needs of the students.
Support for the students also changes, learners can get support also from other
instances than just teachers e.g. from other students or experts. From
pedagogic approaches addition to authentic e-learning, I got interested in
connectivism and in universal design.
In connectivism I liked the independency of the students and the
teacher´s role. Teachers need to take part to a course like students. Teachers
are creating and working in the same place and with the same content as
students do. Teacher creates a community together with the students by
participating and engaging similarly. Students do what they think is relevant.
So in connectivist course everybody does different things. The community is
open and everybody can interact with each other. Evaluation happens by
evaluating if the person has developed an appropriate personal knowledge in the
network. Evaluation here was interesting, and I would like to understand more
about it. Evaluation in multicultural e-learning environment should also change
from the traditional way of evaluation but that part is still a bit vague for
me.
I think that I could also utilize Universal design method in my teaching
at the future. Universal design emphasizes diversity and flexibility. Universal
design could help me in practice to take into account as many different
learners as possible when designing a course. Things I could consider from
universal design are the three main components of Universal Design Language
(UDL), Dynamic Instructional Design (DID) Steps and the learning types. The
main idea of Universal Design is that products and environment should be usable
at the very beginning by all people. This could be done with three steps; have
multiple representations of information, alternative means of expression and
varied options for engagement. Knowing the learners is important, and various
instructional techniques and teaching strategies have been listed by grouping
different learning types. With the help of Universal Design method I can ensure
the support of diversity and flexibility of the course and the material.
As summary, I think I learned a lot of multicultural e-learning during
this course. I understood the importance of culture in learning, and the need
for a new way of learning. I think authentic learning provides me practical
steps how to implement multicultural e-learning with nine elements. I also
think that other pedagogic approaches like Universal Design and Connectivism do
support in many ways authentic type of learning and I could utilize those
approaches too. Connectivism reminds me to give as much independency to the
learner as possible and universal design helps me to ensure the diversity and
flexibility of the course material.
After this course I´m more confident that multicultural e-learning is
the way to move forward in learning and currently the authenticity and peer
learning seem to be important there. This course helped me to form a vision
what learning can be today and to which way I want to go. Course gave me a more
clear idea and also tools to implement the idea. This was also the first time
when I wrote blogs and commented peer learners’ blogs. Writing a blog and
reflecting the learning was very useful and in addition to read and comment
others thoughts were enlightening. Sometimes there were also good discussions
raised. Based on this experience, I understand the importance of reflection and
peer learning and the need to use that for effective learning. There was also a
very rich literature in the course which helped to deepen the understanding.
No doubt this course has given me a lot of ideas and better
understanding about the multicultural authentic e-learning. To me it made a lot
of sense and I want to be part of this kind of learning at the future. My pair
of shoes is not enough for learning also others´shoes are needed.
REFERENCES
Teräs, H., Leppisaari, I., Teräs, M. &
Herrington, J. (2012). Facilitating the development of multicultural learning communities
through authentic e-learning. In Kommers, P., Issa, T. & Isaias, P. (Eds.)
Proceedings of IADIS International Conference on International Higher Education
(IHE 2012) (pp. 29-36). PDF
Liu, X., Liu, S., Lee, S.-H., & Magjuka, R. J.
(2010). Cultural Differences in
Online Learning: International Student Perceptions. Educational Technology
& Society 13 (3), 177–188. Retrieved 18.7.2013 from
http://www.ifets.info/journals/13_3/16.pdf
English-Korean Experiences of environmental education. Educational &
Technology Society Journal 15 (2), 244-256.
http://www.ifets.info/journals/15_2/21.pdf
Downes, S. (2011). Connectivist Learning: How new technologies are
promoting autonomy and responsibility in
education,
http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/connectivist-learning-how-new-technologies-are-promoting-autonomy-and-responsibility-in-education
Universal Design for Culturally-Diverse Online Learning (Eberle &
Childress, 2007) PDF
Herrington, J., Reeves, T.C & Oliver, R. (2010). A guide to
authentic e-learning. London and New York: Routledge.
