Strategies for Smooth and Effective Cross-Cultural Online Collaborative Learning

Abstract

Introduction The global village nature of the world has become more salient in recent years (Landis, Bennett, & Bennett, 2003), and people from different cultures are communicating more and more with each other. The collaboration between different cultures has also been increasing dramatically. It has therefore become very important that current generation of students has acquired multi-cultural awareness and cross-cultural collaborative skills before it embarks on to the work environment. Trilling & Fadel (2009) proposed century skills in the book 21st century skills: learning for life in our times, with cross-cultural communication competence and collaboration competence being included in those skills. They stressed these skills to be essential for students for better involvement in future society and for having good performance in the future career. For cultivating students' cross-cultural ability, the first choice is to be immersed in another culture for a long time and have face-to-face communication with local people (Wang, 2011). Although the international activities of universities have dramatically expanded in volume, scope, and complexity over the past two decades, especially the study abroad programs allowing students to learn about other cultures for cultivating their cross-cultural awareness and cross-cultural collaborative skills (Altbach & Knight, 2007), very few students in fact are able to avail such opportunities, and existing opportunities are not sufficient by any means when considering the current notions that intercultural education should be implemented into all levels and forms of education in the future (Harms, Niederhauser, Davis, Roblyer, & Gilbert, 2006; Wang, 2011). In this context, web 2.0 technologies have emerged as a potentially vast technological solution for global knowledge sharing, construction and distribution across groups, countries, and cultures (Friedman, 2005). When collaboration involves cross-cultural experience, it not only expands students' view of multiculturalism, but also enhances their self-concept and cross-cultural communication and collaboration competence (Cifuentes & Murphy, 2000). Crosscultural online collaborative learning utilizing web 2.0 technologies is therefore proposed in this paper as a way to enable communication and collaboration among students from different cultures. Cross-cultural dimension in this paper refers to the context where students from different cultures take part in online collaborative learning, without any emphasis on essential cultural attributes. Beginning with email, educators have applied technology to increase cultural awareness over the past three decades which has provided an online method for improving students' learning experience in a cross-cultural context (Liaw & Johnson, 2001). Learning management systems, blogs, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and even synchronous communication methods have been used by researchers to facilitate cross-cultural online learning (Law & Nguyen-Ngoc, 2010; Wang, 2012; Wang & Chen, 2012 ; Wu, Marek, & Chen, 2013). Researchers have also explored pedagogy, instructional design, task and assessment design for cross-cultural online learning (McLoughlin, 2001; Chen, Hsu, & Caropreso, 2006), and collaboration and community building are generally regarded as designs for cross-cultural online learning, which explains the rationale behind the current study on cross-cultural online collaborative learning. Researchers have argued that learning through cross-cultural online collaboration is not an easy task (Kim & Bonk, 2002; Wang, 2011; Canto, Jauregi, & van den Bergh, 2013), and therefore it is important to identify and explore critical factors for smooth and cross-cultural online collaborative learning. Smooth and effective are used here to indicate the requirements for the implementing cross-cultural online collaborative learning. …