Culture heavily influences the ways we think and act. In a globalized world, the underestimation of cultural factors can lead to serious consequences. In educational courses involving students from all over the world, it is important to consider cultural diferences. Having high levels of Cultural Situation Awareness is therefore fundamental for both teachers and students. In this work, we propose an approach to build and maintain Cultural Situation Awareness in an adaptive e-learning system.
1. Introduction cultural diferences. In this work, we propose an approach to support both students and teachers in the The COVID-19 pandemic forced many schools and uni- understanding of the cultural diferences while enjoyversities all around the world to adopt online learn- ing or delivering learning content in a blended learning, in diferent forms, to continue their educational ing setting, by fostering the building and maintaining activities, trying to minimize as much as possible the of what is called Cultural Situation Awareness (CSA). interruption due to the social distancing imposed by the governments to face the coronavirus. The transition to online learning for many universities has not 2. Cultural Situation Awareness been without dificulties and challenges, both from the technological and the pedagogic viewpoints. Several Situation Awareness (SA) has been defined by Endsley forms of distance learning have been used, ranging as the perception of the elements in the environment from completely asynchronous approaches with pre- within a volume of time and space (SA Level 1), the recorded lessons and educational materials wherein stu- comprehension of their meaning (SA Level 2) and the dents should self study, to synchronous online learn- projection of their status in the near future (SA Level ing in which face to face lectures are given by the teacher 3) [1]. SA is a crucial construct in decision making and to a virtual class via videoconferencing systems. Hy- in the management of operations in many large combrid approaches have been often adopted, which can plex system, having a dramatic impact on human debe referred to as blended learning. This trend pro- cision making and human performance in tasks that motes the presence of students from diferent cultures require complex cognitive eforts [2]. More recently, in the same classroom (physical or virtual). If on one Endsley drew attention to the importance of cultural hand the presence of diferent cultures is a great en- aspects during the process of SA acquisition and rerichment for the students and the society, on the other tention [3]. For some kinds of tasks, like for military hand, it demands great attention by the teachers (es- operations, the understanding of the cultural aspects pecially in face-to-face lectures) that should provide of the involved people is critical to successfully comlearning contents suitable for diferent cultures. This plete the desired task. Therefore, according to Endsley, is not only to respect the diferent cultures but espe- we can define Cultural Situation Awareness (CSA) as cially because it has been demonstrated that culture an integral component of the human’s overall SA, rehas an impact on the way we learn, communicate, and lated to the cultural factors which comprehend the set think. Therefore, to deliver an efective lecture for of shared values, beliefs, attitudes, norms characterizall the students, the teacher should pose attention to ing a specific group of people. According to Bodley [4], culture involves what people think, what they do, and the products (material and immaterial) they produce.
JCooilnletgPeroSctaeetidoinn,gUsSoAfthe ACM IUI 2021 Workshops, April 13–17, 2021, Culture influences members of a society by shaping " gidaniello@unisa.it (G. D’Aniello); mgaeta@unisa.it (M. Gaeta) their values, perceptions and behaviors [5].
0000-0002-8687-9348 (G. D’Aniello); 0000-0001-7209-3355 (M. Several works studied the impact of the presence of Gaeta) students from diferent cultures in a course and the effect of cross-cultural teaching [5, 6, 7]. In particular, © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative CPWrEooUrckReshdoinpgs IhStpN:/c1e6u1r3-w-0s.o7r3g CCoEmUmoRns WLiceonrsekAsthtriobuptioPnr4o.0cIneteerdnaitniognasl ((CCC EBYU4R.0)-.WS.org) according to [8], underestimating the culture’s role in e-Learning may lead to misunderstanding learners’ reactions to diferent kinds of stimuli, which could lead to an error of adaptation to the learners’ needs. In the context of online learning and blended learning, having a good level of CSA for teachers requires: i) at SA Level 1, the perception of cultural cues, human behavior’s aspect and cultural facts and events; ii) at SA Level 2, the complex sociocultural relationships between individuals and the impact these could have on the learning processes and learning objectives should be identified; iii) at SA Level 3, the possible actions that the teacher would like to perform for interacting with the students should be analyzed according to the cultural situation of the classroom, and the potential efects of such actions should be evaluated in order for deciding which will be the best way to act. and the related situations are modeled using ontolo3. Cultural Situation Awareness gies [13] and are contained in the cognition layer. The in an e-Learning system situation can be identified using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps [9] or using semantic-based and rule-based approaches In recent works [9, 10, 11], we have defined an Adap- [14, 15, 16, 17]. The identified situation will be used by tive e-Learning system based on the SA paradigm and the situation exploitation module to adapt the applicadesigned using the Goal-directed Task Analysis (GDTA) tion interface and in particular to provide teachers and approach [12]. This system is able to recognize the sit- students with recommendations and feedback suitable uations involving the students by analyzing the activi- for the cultural situation [18, 19]. Moreover, the situaties the students perform using the system. The recog- tion can be exploited also to: identify unsuitable learnnized situation, together with the goal of the student, ing contents for some cultures; draw the attention of is used to adapt the learning course in terms of learn- the teacher to gender issues; propose a team-working ing contents, learning objectives, but also to adapt the activity rather than an individual task; suggest a more interface and the overall user experience. Feedbacks formal style instead of an informal one; and so on. The are sent to both students and teachers to guide their teacher could use these suggestions for adapting the activities according to the current situation and their teaching style and the learning contents. Let us conactive goals. In this work, we propose an extension sider the following scenario to demonstrate how the of such system to support Cultural Situation Aware- proposed approach works. A teacher is giving her lecness, depicted in Figure 1. The students interact with ture for the course on Algorithms and Data Structures the e-learning dashboard to follow the lectures, con- at a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science in an Italsult the learning and multimedia contents, collaborate ian university, using the Adaptive e-Learning System, with the other students using the social tools avail- to a virtual classroom due to the restrictions for conable in the platform, and so on. These activities pro- taining the Covid-19 pandemic imposed by the Italian duce data regarding the students and the learning pro- Government. The lecture is given using a videoconfergresses. Each student has a user profile, created during encing system embedded in the proposed e-Learning the registration in the e-learning system, which con- system. The classroom is essentially composed of Italtains information on his/her background, geographi- ian students, but recently two Chinese students have cal location, interests, and some cultural information. joined the course remotely. The teacher gave the same Notice that such information can also be inferred and courses in previous years only to Italian students and updated by analyzing user behavior. This data repre- she usually has an amicable and colloquial style to fasents the input of the situation identification module, cilitate the interactions with the classroom. However, whose task is to identify the cultural situation by ana- in this new situation, the system identifies the fact that lyzing the gathered data and by considering the active Chinese students are in the classroom, and continugoal. All the possible goals identified in the GDTA ously suggest the teacher preferring a more formal style to avoid foreign student perceive the teaching style as rude. Moreover, the system suggests the teacher ask- [9] G. D’Aniello, M. De Falco, M. Gaeta, M. Lepore, ing rapid questions to the two students during the lec- Feedback generation using fuzzy cognitive maps ture. Indeed, in Chinese culture, students rarely ask to reduce dropout in situation-aware e-learning questions to the teacher by themselves since this is systems, in: 2020 IEEE Int. Conf. on Cognitive often considered as a challenge to the teacher, while and Computational Aspects of Situation Manageusually is the teacher to ask questions to the Chinese ment, 2020, pp. 195–199. students to foster the discussion [20]. This simple ex- [10] G. D’Aniello, M. De Falco, M. Gaeta, M. Lepample scenario shows which kind of adaptive behav- ore, A situation-aware learning system based on iors can be embedded in the system, using FCMs and fuzzy cognitive maps to increase learner motigoal-driven modeling, taking into account the role of vation and engagement, in: IEEE International Cultural Situation Awareness. Conference on Fuzzy Systems, 2020. [11] M. Chang, G. D’Aniello, M. Gaeta, F. Orciuoli,
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