6 Online Communication Across Cultures

Facilitating Culturally Sensitive Online Discussions

In many online learning environments, online discussion forums are the primary way students interact with one another and with their faculty. Discussion forums can be a great way to build an online community and engage learners in online classes. However, to be effective, faculty need to be actively engaged and promote collaboration. In multicultural online classes, faculty should also encourage learners from diverse backgrounds to share their perspectives and be mindful of cultural differences in communication styles. For example, if one of the discussion forums in a class is intended to be a debate, it might be challenging for some international learners to actively participate. When faculty are active in the discussion forums, provide thoughtful responses, are culturally aware, promote deeper conversations and global perspectives, they create online discussions that are more engaging and dynamic.

Incorporating Culturally Aware Instructor Feedback

Quality instructor feedback is vital to student learning in any educational setting; however, in online learning it has been found to be a major influencer to students’ success. According to Karkar Esperat (2022) instructors who provide meaningful and quality feedback to their students are demonstrating compassionate love. Compassionate love means the instructor has a genuine concern for student success and satisfaction in their courses and actively employs methods that ensure meaningful learning experiences. Participants in a study by Karkar Esperat (2022) stated that quality written feedback had an impact on their overall success in the course. For international students, quality feedback can provide them with the confidence needed to progress in their course (Karkar Esperat, 2022). Not only is quality feedback crucial to student success, but instructors should also provide international students with clear, step-by-step instruction of the requirements of the course (Karkar Esperat, 2022). This guidance is especially beneficial for international students who are new to the U.S. education system, and who have limited experience in online learning, offering them clear direction.

Providing quality and timely feedback is important to all learners in online courses; however, providing culturally sensitive feedback is equally as important. Feedback that is culturally sensitive is written or provided in a way to learners respecting the way they may interpret or act upon the feedback. By creating feedback that is culturally sensitive, faculty can personalize their feedback to each individual student to make the feedback more relatable and constructive, leading to increased understanding of the course outcomes and less possibility for misunderstandings. By becoming more culturally aware, faculty can gain the knowledge needed to be culturally sensitive in their feedback. Other strategies that faculty can incorporate to have more culturally aware feedback are:

1. 1. Clear feedback: Ensure that your feedback is clear and avoid using jargon or overly complex language.
   2. Feedback variety: Provide learners with a mix of written, audio, or video feedback. By providing learners with a variety of feedback, you can reduce the chances of misinterpretation. Additionally, for international learners, hearing tone may assist them with deeper comprehension of the feedback and help them feel more supported.
   3. Rubrics: Provide learners with clear assignment expectations that can be easily understood by all learners. Additionally provide rubrics and assessment examples.
   4. Encourage questions: Encourage students to ask questions about the feedback you provide. Send an email or post an announcement letting them know you are happy to answer any questions they may have related to their feedback.
   5. Personalize feedback: When providing feedback, reference the students individual work. This can help international students better understand the expectations, but also help to motivate and encourage them for future assessments.
   6. Continuous feedback: Don’t just provide feedback on major assessments, offer small feedback check ins throughout the course.
   7. Consider tone: Learners from high context cultures may find direct feedback as overly critical or even disrespectful. Provide feedback that is clear, but also sensitive. For example, instead of writing: “This paragraph is unclear. You need to rewrite it,” a more culturally sensitive approach might be: “Thank you for your thoughtful ideas in this paragraph. To make your points more clear for readers, consider reorganizing these sentences or adding an example.” Both messages communicate the need for revision, but the second example softens the directness while still providing clear guidance.

Quality and timely instructor feedback is an essential component in online education. For additional support on how to give effective feedback to your online learners, you can visit Purdue Owl’s section on feedback.

Addressing Potential Misunderstandings

In asynchronous, online courses where communication is primarily written, it is easy for misunderstandings to occur between faculty and students. This can be even more likely to happen with learners from different cultural backgrounds. There have been many examples and strategies presented throughout this book that faculty can use to reduce the potential for misunderstandings. Let’s revisit a few and consider a few additional strategies:

1. 1. Easy navigation: Ensure your online course is easy to navigate and find information. Some universities rely on course templates to help reduce learner cognitive load in the navigation of online courses. You can also refer to Quality Matters to learn more about how to design effective online courses.
   2. Clear communication: Provide your learners with simple and clear communication, throughout the course, in discussions and on feedback, for assignment instructions, and in other written or verbal communication.
   3. Encourage open communication: Engage your learners by creating an online culture where they feel comfortable asking questions and reaching out if they are confused about course assessments or activities.
   4. Offer support: Provide learners who need additional support with resources throughout your course.
   5. Provide global examples: Provide global examples in your communications to help international students relate to the material and resources.
   6. Question forum: Create a “community café” or questions forum where learners can ask questions related to the course.