Appalachian Foundation Fellows Grants

«Funded»

The aim of this project is to provide me the opportunity to study and research in a new area of cross-disciplinary scholarship on the design of online learning environments to better support cross-cultural collaboration. In spite of the growing popularity of both text-based and 3D virtual worlds for education, there is a lack of published empirical research related to communication styles and cognitive differences in employing distance learning systems within multicultural groups. Communication styles and cognitive processes differ drastically between various cultures. However, all leading learning management systems currently promoted for open and distance learning are based primarily on asynchronous text-based interaction. I believe that these systems favor the low-context communication style, and ignore the necessity of environmental and non-verbal clues anticipated within a high-context culture. Immersive 3D virtual worlds, where students can interact in visual environments using life-like human characters for self-representation, can provide learning environments more engaging for students from high-context cultures. Therefore, this study involves advancing my intercultural literacy within a high-context culture, then designing and implementing a comparative research project to study cross-cultural differences within text-based and immersive distance learning modalities.