Thursday, April 19, 2007

Intercultural Learning!

The last days we (Luuk and I) have spend in Rome with the Spanish/Italian/Dutch development team. Our task and mission is to create a feasible and powerful course on e-Learning Fundamentals for a varied group of learners. We are aiming at 250 learners, all over Europe.

The course will be build using the cultural model of Hofstede. With the course we are testing if the variables of Hofstede are also suitable when we are talking about e-Learning and a young, globalized population.


The development team

E.g. to explain it a bit: Hofstede is using Uncertainty avoidance as a differentiator for intercultural audience. People from a culture with a high score on uncertainty avoidance will prefer highly structured and leading learning content with a clear and straightforward language. People from cultures with a low uncertainty avoidance will prefer more explorative, open learning situations and content. An example of a country with low uncertainty avoidance is The Netherlands (score 51/100), a country with high uncertainty avoidance is Greece (score 95/100). We will create the course in such a varied way that the preferences will lead us to the conclusion if the Hofstede model is suitable for e-Learning and new generations as well.

The course will start on 21st of May and will have duration of 6 weeks. Every week will have a Teaser, a WBT, a learner generating content activity and a Reflection activity. We will use Moodle as the learning platform and eXe as the WBT creation tool.

If you are interested in participating in the course, just drop a mail or reaction.

5 comments:

Wilfred Rubens said...

Hi Marcel,

Please give Nick Kearney my best regards!

Marcel de Leeuwe said...

Hi Wilfred,

Of course I will do it! It is nice working with Nick and when I was talking about Moodle and was showing the Fontys environment, a couple of people saw your name (also Alessandra) and start talking about you.

So you are world famous in Europe ;-)

Warm regards,

Marcel

Unknown said...

Hello Marcel,

I just added the RSS-feed of weblog to my bloglines account.
There are some nice articles in it.

But I'm wandering about the articles about the FeConE e-learning course. Aren't you afraid that the information will find it's way to the students following the course and therefore, influence the outcome of the research?

I doubt I will be the only participant who will have found this weblog entry.

I do like the e-learning course until now though. I'm looking forward to the next weeks.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Beijnen

Marcel de Leeuwe said...

Hi Jeroen,

Nice to see you here as well! I understand your idea of the influence the information on Fe-ConE copuld have on the research outcome.

I think the information provided so far is not secret and will not influence the outcome. For the rest I will keep a radio silence on this topic for the next few weeks.

Besides this I think the cultural influences are so significant and will be visible anyway. What we are keeping behind are the different approaches (per week and per activity) that will say something about the cultural differences.

Kind regards,

Marcel

Anonymous said...

Hi, Marcel! I am a participant in Fe-ConE course. On me this partnership is really interesting, I know new things for e-Learning. I am very happy be one student of the your course!
Sincerely,
Iliyana Chakarova