My reflections and conclusions

At the very beginning, the shoes I had were colorful and comfortable. My shoes were very global, since the brand is multinational and my shoes were made in Vietnam. I had some concerns about the sustainability of my shoes. To me multicultural eLearning was one of the options to consider for the sustainable education which can improve the quality of the people´s lives. So I started the journey to learn more about authentic e-learning in multicultural context.

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.