Globalisation and the cultural impact on distance education
Introduction
The role of a distance educator in today's quest for the delivery of knowledge to a global community must begin with the question, “What do I need to consider about my own culture before I embark on the delivery of education to a culture that predictably will be different to my own?”
This paper, in a summative fashion, reflects on the cultural impact of ‘tried and true’ successful distance education teaching modalities used at Aalborg [1] University in their distance education program, in an Australian setting, and also reflects upon the experience of the supervisor and the student.
Education by distance faces many challenges, as we all are aware, these are all well documented [2]. We all know that the feelings of isolation, time management, compatibility of technology are some of the issues that need to be carefully thought about. When one contemplates the extra hurdles of dealing with a country that has a different language and a different culture, then the considerations of delivering education needs to be viewed with a more in-depth perspective. Are we able as educators to consider these differences whilst sitting inside our own culture?
Section snippets
Summative experience
First, we should consider the meaning of the word ‘culture’. The concise Oxford dictionary [3] defines culture as the following:
- 1.
the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively;
- 2.
a refined understanding of this intellectual development;
- 3.
the customs, civilisation and achievements of a particular time or people; and
- 4.
improvement by mental or physical training.
Michael Demeester [4] describes culture in his summary as “culture is an abstract concept. It
Discussion
A program in health informatics can be very successful within one nation, and achieve good results within neighbouring countries. However, when the program is diffused to more distant countries, unforeseen problems may occur. The situation is very similar to the transfer of IT systems, where one very well functioning system can prove to be of limited or no value to organisations in even near-by countries.
In the Babel project, cultural preferences in development and implementation of health
Conclusion
Distance education relies on the technologies of delivery. Print materials, computer conferencing, electronic mail, interactive video, telecommunications and multimedia are all used to facilitate and promote the student to teacher, and student to student interaction, collaboration and feedback.
Tested and successful modalities within a national environment that have very positive outcomes for distance education revealed the potential to have a negative effect when delivered to an international
Uncited reference
[4].
References (5)
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Strategic planning of the master programme in health informatics at Aalborg University: targeting and updating the programme to meet explicit customer needs
Int. J. Med. Informatics
(1998) - ...
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