Intercultural competence is a set of cognitive, behavioral, and afective skills that are critical for efective and appropriate communication and collaboration with people of diferent cultures. To efectively work in multicultural groups, and develop intercultural competence, a student must be aware of his/her cultural values and those of each member of the group, understand the cultural diferences and decide the best course of action for communicating and collaborating with others, by achieving and maintaining adequate levels of cultural situation awareness. In this paper, we propose a conceptual architecture of a situation-aware adaptive e-learning system to support the work of multicultural student groups, fostering the development of intercultural competence.
1. Introduction support cultural situation awareness of the students and their intercultural competencies.
In the global economy, all sectors are required to operate in multicultural environments, whether in dealing with clients or within their own workforces. To prepare 2. Cultural Situation Awareness the future workers that will operate in such environments, learning courses should focus on developing the Situation awareness (SA) is the capability of humans to intercultural competence of the students. Intercultural understand what is happening in the surrounding envicompetence enables students to interact both efectively ronment with respect to the specific goals they are purand in a way that is acceptable to others when taking suing. More formally, SA has been defined by Endsley as part in a group whose members have diferent cultural the perception of the elements in the environment within backgrounds [1, 2, 3]. Due to globalization, and thanks to a volume of time and space (SA Level 1), the comprehenmany specific programs for student exchange, and thanks sion of their meaning (SA Level 2) and the projection of to online learning courses that can be easily accessible by their status in the near future (SA Level 3) [10]. The SA students from all over the world, classrooms are always is influenced by many individual and cognitive factors more international, with students coming from diferent like goals, experience, training, ability, preconceptions. cultures [4, 5]. Although both educators and employers All these factors are in part determined by the cultural agree on the high value of intercultural competence, as aspects. Indeed, culture involves what people think, what well as most higher education institutions consider these they do, and the products (material and immaterial) they skills as important outcomes for their graduates, only a produce [11]. Culture influences members of society by few have specifically addressed the means by which such shaping their values, perceptions, and behaviors [12]. competencies may develop [6]. Students, as well as edu- Cultural Situation Awareness (CSA) is defined as an incators, involved in multicultural classrooms and groups, tegral component of the human’s overall SA, related to need support to understand the cultural diferences and the cultural factors which comprehend the set of shared how to deal with them, to develop their intercultural in- values, beliefs, attitudes, norms characterizing a specific telligence. In this paper, we envision an extension of our group of people [13]. For many tasks and, in particular, situation-aware Adaptive e-Learning System [7, 8, 9] to for tasks performed by a multicultural group of people (as in some military operations, business meetings, international research activities, etc.), the understanding of the cultural aspects of the people involved is fundamental for the success of the tasks and for the achievement of the goal.
Several works studied the impact of the presence of students from diferent cultures in a course and the effect of cross-cultural teaching [12, 14, 15]. In particular, according to [16], 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. On the other hand, the composition of multicultural groups of students could improve the cultural intelligence of each group member. But, in such contexts, it is important that each student is aware of the cultural diferences of her mates, and that she knows how to interact with the others students. When performing activities with students coming from diferent culture, each student needs suggestions and feedback to understand and learn how to interact with others and develop their capabilities of CSA.
Specifically, in the context of online and blended learning, having a good level of CSA for students in the context of multicultural groups, requires: i) at SA Level 1, the perception of cultural cues, human behavior’s aspects, 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 and modalities that should be considered to interact with the other students according to the intercultural situation of the group [9]. system provides social and collaborative features, like chat, instant messaging, blog, videoconferencing, forum, etc, to ease the communication and collaboration within 3. An Adaptive e-Learning System the group, fostering the development of soft skills. The group has a common learning goal, which requires the for Intercultural Situation completion of a series of tasks, and the production of Awareness some outcomes (e.g., reports, essays, presentations, etc.).
The conceptual architecture of the Adaptive Learning An Adaptive e-Learning system based on the SA paradigm System is sketched in Fig. 1. The architecture has been and designed using the Goal-directed Task Analysis (GDTA) developed following the design principles of situation approach [17] has been proposed in our previous works awareness [17]. The architecture was organized into [7, 8, 9]. This system is able to recognize the situations tiered subsystems, of which the most important ones are: involving the students by analyzing the activities they i) Data Acquisition and Representation; ii) User Model; perform. The recognized situation, together with the iii) Learning Management system; iv) Feedback Generagoal of the student, is used to adapt the learning course tion v) Behavior Tracker and User Profiling; vi) Situation in terms of learning contents, learning objectives, but Identification; vii) Student Dashboard. also to adapt the interface and the overall user experi- The learning system maintains an updated user model ence. Feedbacks are sent to both students and teachers to for each student. The user model contains: the usual inguide their activities according to the current situation formation about the user (personal information, account, and their active goals. In this work, we propose an ex- preferences, sentiments [18]); the learning path, which tension of such system to support and improve the level contains information on the courses, learning activities, of cultural situation awareness and the acquisition of objectives the user should complete or has already comintercultural competencies of students working in multi- pleted; and a model of the competencies of the user. cultural groups. The competencies are modeled according Knowledge
Let’s consider a typical scenario involving the pro- Skill-Attitude (KSA) model [19, 20], implemented using posed system. A multicultural group of students is per- SKOS 1. There are two main parts in the proposed KSA forming a team project. Each student of the group inter- model, depicted in Fig. 2. The first represents the compeacts with the other members through the platform, enjoy- tencies related to the learning activities and objectives; ing also the available didactic materials (lectures, slides, the second represents the intercultural competence. The articles, video, etc.), to complete the assigned learning ac- second part, representing intercultural competence, has tivities and achieve the learning objectives. The learning teacher or automatically by the learning system according to the learning objectives) and they will develop their intercultural competencies and develop the capabilities needed to build and maintain the CSA. At the end of the activity, a new questionnaire will measure the improvements obtained by each student for each KSA. Specific questionnaires can be used to measure also the level of SA [24]. This assessment will also provide interesting information to teacher and learner content creators to adapt and improve their courses, as to make them more efective in terms of intercultural competence awareness and development.
Another fundamental module of the system is the feedback generation module. This module uses Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) as described in our previous works [8, 7, 25, 9]. The maps are used to identify the situation involving the student and the whole group. According to this situation and considering the learning goal of the group, the system sends appropriate feedback to each student to improve the current situation, helping her in achieving the goal, and in particular, to develop interFigure 2: KSA model of learning activities and intercultural cultural competence. Feedback consists of suggestions, competencies. additional learning materials that should be studied, exercises, multimedia contents, topics, and ideas on which to develop a conversation with the other students, etc. been defined on the basis of the models proposed in In the context of the intercultural e-learning system, in [21, 22]. Knowledge necessary for intercultural com- particular, the FCM aims at evaluating the cultural charpetence included awareness of own culture (how our acteristics of each student of the group. This includes culture influences our understanding of the world); so- the evaluation of the cultural competencies and the interciolinguistic awareness; elements of the culture of the cultural intelligence owned by the student The module others 2. Skills include observation, listening, critical evaluates diferences and similarities between cultural thinking, observing. Intercultural attitudes include cu- competencies and intercultural aspects of each student riosity and openness, discovery, respect, readiness to of the group. On the basis of the diferences between suspend disbelief about other cultures, and belief about the students, and considering the learning activities they one’s own. are developing, the objective they have to achieve (e.g.,
The module Behavior Tracker and User Profiling ana- improve the awareness of the other cultures, improve lyzes the activities of the students to assess their compe- the sociolinguistic competencies, etc.), the learning path tencies, their level of proficiency according to the learn- will be adapted (by the Learning Management Module) ing objectives, and to understand their profiles. In liter- to foster the development of CSA and intercultural comature, complex techniques based on deep learning have petencies. During the execution of the learning activities, been proposed to identify the profile of the users analyz- the system continuously monitors the situation of every ing their interactions with a system [23]. The module is single student and those of the whole group. In case also responsible for identifying the level of intercultural of a significant deviation between a current state and competence owned by the students. Such competencies the learning objective, the system will send feedback to can be assessed using diferent tools and questionnaires. the students (using the FCM). In particular, the system A review of intercultural competence assessment meth- will guide the conversations and the common activities ods is proposed in [6]. By proposing a questionnaire between the students, remembering the cultural pecuat the beginning of the learning activities, the system liarities and diferences, and the suggested appropriate measures the baseline intercultural competencies of each actions, to develop their CSA. member of the student group. These cultural competencies are stored in the User Model. During the group work, the students will execute the task (assigned by the 4. Illustrative example
awareness/interculturality/
tem works in a real case. This scenario will also be used in future works for an experimentation carried out in the the system is able to send feedback and suggestions to context of an elective university course called Cross Cul- students, using the Fuzzy Cognitive Map, encouraging tural Management (Data Science & Innovation Manage- collaboration and communication within the group. At ment Master Degree at the University of Salerno, Italy). the end of the course activities, further surveys (like the Considering that the course is chosen by students is al- previous ones) will be administered. This will allow to ready in itself information about their expected high level measure the improvement of competencies and to update of motivation to learn from other cultures or in any case the student’s profile. The evaluation will be aimed both to be part of a multicultural context. The course aims at measuring the improvement of students’ abilities - and to provide students with an endowment of knowledge specifically the CQ - and at providing feedback on the related to the analysis of cultural variables, as well as composition of the groups, and on the adequacy of the economic and social, that have an impact on individ- concept map used. ual and organizational behavior. It also aims to develop skills necessary for understanding the problems of interaction between diferent cultures within an organization 5. Conclusion or between organizations of diferent nationalities, for managing global teams (innovative, virtual, face to face). In this work, a conceptual architecture of a situationThis course places greater emphasis on the human skills aware adaptive e-learning system to support the developrequired to deal with the diversity inherent in global ment of intercultural competence and the collaborative teams. Overall, it aims to develop the students’ Cultural work of multicultural student groups has been proposed. Intelligence (CQ) defined as an individual’s capability The system is based on the situation-awareness paradigm to function and manage efectively in culturally diverse and, in particular, it supports the cultural situation awaresettings [26]. The student, at the end of the course, will ness of the students. In future work, the approach will be acquire the theoretical knowledge and practical skills on evaluated in real-world scenarios in university courses, problem-solving approaches, and the ability to use the as detailed in the illustrative example provided. main tools devoted to the resolution of specific problems deriving from cultural diferences. References
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