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Managing the needs of learners is crucial in order to support their motivation and keep dropout rates on a low level. With the constantly growing level of internationalization in classrooms, the variety of different context-specific requirements from learners increase; without a profound understanding of the learners’ contexts, successfully maintaining a culture-sensitive and learner-focussed education is impossible. A solution to reach this understanding is the open exchange of experiences and knowledge amongst educators of the different contexts. In this paper, we will briefly introduce the two European projects “Open Discovery Space” (ODS) and “Inspiring Science Education” (ISE), which have the aim to foster the establishment and improvement of Open Educational Practices in the context of school education. The purpose of this paper is to attract and invite potential partners to affiliate with, contribute to, and profit from the projects.
This paper addresses special skills, learners in Internet-based learning scenarios need. In self-directed learning scenarios, as most Internet-based learning scenarios are designed, learners bear the responsibility for their learning progress. To ease this task, institutions could prime the learners for the situation which may be quite different to their previous learning experiences. Basing on a Delphi-study, conducted with experts from the e-Learning sector in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the basic requirements have been determined.
One idea behind Open Educational Resources (OERs) is opening up the access to learning resources for stakeholders who were not the originally targeted users. Even though making educational resources available for the public already is a remarkable achievement, their usefulness often is limited to a very particular context because of unclear or missing appropriateness regarding other contexts. In this paper, contextual appropriateness is investigated as a special quality criterion for OERs. We will introduce barriers against the use of OERs and demands from the educational community that need to be addressed in order to overcome such barriers. We will show that the hitherto implemented quality standards for Technology Enhanced Learning do not yet fully support such particular demands and discuss which additional steps are required for the context of OERs. We conclude with an outlook and recommendations that can open up the full potential of OERs.
This presentation shows that students in different cultural contexts have different perceptions of time management and work organization. Particularly in group work scenarios, such differences can have a frustrating impact on students from other cultural contexts because e.g., expectations are not met. Being aware of such differences between the learners in a culturally heterogeneous educational scenario, educators can prevent frustration by introducing their students and providing more specific instructions.
For learners, feedback can be both, a strong motivator but in case it fails its purpose, it can be a strong reason for frustration and dropouts as well. Do we have to change our locally implemented feedback strategies when adapting learning contents from national to international settings? In our study, we the investigated learners’ understanding and preferences regarding feedback in scenarios of higher education across the five different national contexts, Bulgaria, Germany, South Korea, Turkey, and Ukraine.
In the context of Internet-based e-Learning, including an international auditory is a logical consequence. However, due to uncertainty regarding the foreign learners, e-Learning programs often are limited to local or national participants. Understanding the different expectations of learners regarding instructor-support is one step in order to enable providers of educational services to tailor educational programs that fit the requirements of an international auditory. We asked university students in five countries regarding their expectations towards instructor-support and found major differences between the investigated countries.
In this paper, we present a solution how to test cultural influences on E-Learning in a global context. Based on a metadata approach, we show how specifically cultural influence factors can be determined to transfer and adapt learning environments. We present a method how those influence factors can be validated for both, to improve the dynamical meta-data specification and to be used in the development of (international) E-Learning scenarios.
In this paper we summarize our research on international educational contexts and transfer the results to the context of urban life-long learning. We will show that a collection and provision of relevant data can help instructors as well as learners to raise their awareness regarding contextual differences, to develop a higher level of acceptance regarding differences, and thus, in the long term, avoid frustration in educational processes and reduce drop out-rates.
Despite the opportunities and benefits of OER, research and practice has shown how the OER repositories have a hard time in reaching an active user-base. The opportunities of experience exchange and simple feedback mechanisms of social software have been realized for improving the situation and many are basing or transforming their OER offerings towards socially powered environments. Research on social software has shown how knowledge-sharing barriers in online environments are highly culture and context-specific and require proper investigation. It is crucial to study what challenges might arise in such environments and how to overcome them, ensuring a successful uptake. A large-scale (N = 855) cross-European investigation was initiated in the school context to determine which barriers teachers and learners perceive as critical. The study highlights barriers on cultural distance, showing how those are predicted by nationality and age of the respondents. The paper concludes with recommendations for overcoming those barriers.
The Whole Is More than the Sum of Its Parts - On Culture in Education and Educational Culture
(2015)
The Learning Culture Survey investigates learners’ expectations towards and perceptions of education on international level with the aim to make culture in the context of education better understandable and support educators to prevent and solve intercultural conflicts in education. So far, we found that culture-related expectations differ between educational settings, depend on the age of the learners, and that a nationally homogenous educational culture is rather an exception than the rule. The results of our recently completed longitudinal study provided evidence that educational culture on the institutional level actually is persistent, at least over a term of four years. After a brief introduction of the general background, we will subsume the steps taken during the past seven years and achieved general insights regarding educational culture. Last, we will introduce a method for the determination of conflict potential, which bases on the understanding of culture as the level to w hich people within a society accept deviations from the usual. We close with demonstrating the method’s functionality on examples from the Learning Culture Survey.
Job-related migration has been fostered across Europe balancing unemployment in one country with demands for employees in others. However, the numbers of early school leavers and university dropouts significantly increased in the hosting countries. We propose a higher measure of cultural sensitivity in education in order to prevent frustration. The Learning Culture Survey investigates learners’ expectations towards and perceptions of education on international level with the aim to make culture in the context of education better understandable. After a brief introduction, we subsume the steps taken during the past seven years and found results. Subsequently, we introduce a method for the determination of conflict potential, which bases on the understanding of culture as the level to which people within a society accept deviations from the usual. We close with demonstrating the usefulness of the data and insights from our Learning Culture Survey in the context of practical scenarios.
Quality Management in Education: Business Process Modelling in Interdisciplinary Environments
(2015)
In this paper, we introduce the international program erp4students as general example on how to successfully prepare university students for the world of works without having to give up the basic principle in higher education, i.e., to exclusively provide sustainable education. We start with introducing the basic concept and design of the program and provide information regarding the demographic development over the past decade and implemented quality assurance mechanisms. Subsequently, the scope and design of and hitherto achieved insights from the Learning Culture Survey are outlined. On the basis of found results, we finally discuss how erp4students can deal with possible culture-specific issues that latest might emerge when the program gets available for learners in the Asian context.
Open educational resources (OERs) provide opportunities as enablers of societal development, but they also create new challenges. From the perspective of content providers and educational institutions, particularly, cultural and context-related challenges emerge. Even though barriers regarding large-scale adoption of OERs are widely discussed, empirical evidence for determining challenges in relation to particular contexts is still rare. Such context-specific barriers generally can jeopardize the acceptance of OERs and, in particular, social OER environments. We conducted a large-scale (N = 855) cross-European investigation in the school context to determine how teachers and learners perceive cultural distance as a barrier against the use of social OER environments. The findings indicate how nationality and age of the respondents are strong predictors of cultural distance barrier. The study concludes with identification of context-sensitive interventions for overcoming the related bar riers. These consequences are vital for OER initiatives and educational institutions for aligning their efforts on OER.