Inter-Cultural Collaborative Learning through Future Learn

Teacher: Dr. Deng Liping (Lisa)

Department: Department of Education Studies, HKBU

The course EDUC1015 “Teaching and learning with ICT” adopts flipped classroom and inter-cultural collaborative learning through the platform of Future Learn. Video-based tutorials are developed to allow self-paced learning outside classroom. A cross-cultural group collaboration is designed and implemented involving students from Hong Kong and USA. This course helps improve both student learning and teaching practice. Students from both sides can benefit from the online discussion of course-related issues, and collaborating on group projects.

To better prepare the students in the intercultural collaboration, Dr Deng provides: (1) pre-intercultural collaboration training of cultural differences in communication and conflict resolution; (2) training of using online platform such as a online platform-Slack for facilitating online discussion and file-sharing; (3) a structured guideline of the group project (i.e., students are required to conduct at least two synchronous online discussion via Zoom. Also, clear timeline and milestones are set for students).

Students’ feedback for the course are collected via end of course questionnaire, students’ individual reflection and students’ post in the online platform. In general, students were positive toward the intercultural collaboration group project. However, students also reported challenge in arranging synchronous online discussion via zoom because of the different time zones. Some students also indicated heavy workload in the project. To handle the challenges faced by the students, Dr Deng instructed a project assistant to monitor students’ progress and offers regular guidance.

Dr Deng also mentioned that she and her international partner Dr. Ying Shen are committed to providing students with the international cultural collaboration experiences. They arranged a number of meetings before the course begins to design the pedagogy and align the assessment rubric. Dr Deng also stresses that similar class size between both HK and US classes are important to ensure equal learning opportunity of cultural exchanges.

When asked if she would continue to re-run the course with intercultural collaboration group project, Dr Deng replied that she hoped to do so with the financial support in hiring a project assistant.

The online platform-slack is used in the project:

Dr Deng’s experiences is published in “Deng, L., Shen, Y. W., & Chan, J. W. (2021). Supporting Cross-Cultural Pedagogy with Online Tools: Pedagogical Design and Student Perceptions. TechTrends, 65(5), 760-770.”