Ebook: Web-Based Teaching and Learning across Culture and Age

With limited empirical research available on online teaching across cultures especially with Native and Hispanic American students, this book will present the findings of a two-year, Spencer-funded study in creating an inclusive (i.e., multicultural and intergenerational) instructional design model for online learning. The book is expected to provide the readers a field guide of teaching approach (comprising pedagogical, technical, relational and other suggestions for teaching) for inclusive e-learning, with a foundation in the research on how students from different cultures and generation groups learn online. This two-year, multi-course-site study, as a first effort to examine online college teaching and learning effective across culture and age, contributed a list of important findings on the following questions: • To what extent are online learning and interaction experiences and performances consistent across varied ethnic/cultural, and age groups and in what ways do they vary? • What online instructional contexts do students and faculty, especially non-traditional and minority students, identify as supporting learning and student success? • What are the relationships between online instructional contexts, online learning performance, and learning success of students with diverse ethnicity/culture and age background? By consolidating the findings for the aforementioned research questions, the researchers of this study have developed a data-driven online instructional design model that can work as a field guide on cross-cultural and intergenerational teaching and learning for online education practitioners.

Identity and diversity permeate teaching and learning. Technology-mediated learning environment designs are infused with cultural values, norms, and assumptions. In addition, age-related diversity mediates interactions, learning, perceptions of instruction, self-regulation, and experience with technology. Individual instructors and/or instructional designers are both cultural insiders and cultural outsiders to diverse groups of online learners. Learning difficulties are likely to arise when underlying pedagogical values, norms, and epistemologies in an online learning setting are culturally inappropriate or ineffective for a learner group. Instructors and learners are usually unaware of how identity and diversity manifest in teaching and learning, and hence experiencing challenges in negotiating academic norms.

With limited empirical research available about online teaching and learning across culture and age, this book presents the findings of a two-year study in exploring an inclusive (i.e., multicultural and intergenerational) instructional design approach for online learning. The book provides readers an overall understanding of epistemological and pragmatic differences in how students from different cultures and generation groups learning online. Data-driven suggestions on the cultural analysis, design, and facilitation of an inclusive online learning environment are provided. Any professional in the area of online teaching and learning, researchers and educators alike, will benefit from the insights into cross-cultural and intergenerational teaching and learning provided.