Cultural Challenges And Research Strategies In Multicultural Moocs

Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs hold the promise of democratising education and benefitting learners from diverse global backgrounds and cultures on a massive scale. We have carried out a systematic literature review on studies that researched cultural aspects in MOOCs. This review has confirmed the importance of cultural difference as a factor that influences globally diverse learners in massive multicultural open online courses and impacts their expectations, perceptions and their whole learning experience. This report identifies various types of research, different educational areas of research focus, the origins of MOOC platforms from the reviewed literature, the language of instruction used, and theoretical frameworks and models for mitigating cultural challenges. It investigates various approaches focussing on different levels of culture.Based on the results of this literature review, this paper provides future researchers with some recommendations and possible directions when conducting research on cultural issues in MOOCs. The paper suggests a shift of research focus towards mixed methodology approaches for better generalisation. Furthermore, triangulation of data and methods in this interdisciplinary field is recommended to gain a deeper and wider understanding of MOOCs. Also, it may be beneficial to investigate cultural differences over several platforms from different global origins and over multiple MOOC iterations. Finally, researchers are encouraged to study cultural characteristics on an individual level, rather than national level, as learners are influenced to different degrees by their physical and virtual experiences.Additionally, this paper presents an inventory of suggestions for MOOC development teams to consider when they are designing and delivering MOOC courses for a multicultural audience.