Instructional Design & The Culture Factor

Okay! So…what is culture?

According to Dutch anthropologist Geert Hofstede, Culture can be defined as the way we think and feel, and what we learn to expect from others as an acceptable behavior. These thoughts, feelings, and expectations become ingrained in us through our interactions with the society. These interactions could be both formal and informal. The informal interactions would include those that happened by chance, or merely due to the fact that we exist where and how we do. The formal interactions would include education, societal interactions, religion, and so on.

The reason why we instructional designers are interested in culture is because it influences the way humans learn. Culture has both rational and irrational influences, and both influences impact our propensity and ability to learn.

Something that all of us will agree upon, probably unanimously, is the fact that the way we teach is greatly influenced by our own culture. A fresh instructional designer with no formal training in instructional design will probably create a lesson that will not entertain the possibility of diverse opinions and cultures. She will most probably create a lesson that will project his own culture and teach accordingly.

Let’s try to look at the different ways that culture impacts the instructional designer’s life. You could be writing for a culturally diverse audience; or an audience, which may be culturally uniform, but their culture different from yours. Whatever be the case, you will need to ensure that you are addressing the culture factor.

Here are some factors that you should keep in mind while developing your courses:
1. Before you begin to design your course do some research about the way your audience learns.
2. Depending on the learning patterns, design your assignments and quizzes.
3. If your audience prefer team effort and like to be collectively responsible for the outcome of a particular effort, you may want to design group exercises.
4. If your audience has a preference towards voicing opinions openly, you may want to add more discussions. These discussions could be guided into formation and expression of opinion and judgment. You may not prefer to do this with an audience that is clearly not comfortable with giving opinions.
5. In cultures where it is acceptable to talk about personal life in an official group, you may want to draw the audience into situations where they could map their thoughts and experiences to the topic under discussion. Such exercises may be unthinkable in cultures, which do not like to mix personal and professional lives.

Far from being exhaustive, the above list is just indicative. If we reflect on our own experiences, we will find a wealth of ideas that can help us enlist our audiences’ attention.

There is another aspect of culture to consider while designing courses. This aspect is easier to understand and implement. As you must’ve guessed this has more to do with symbols, language, places, and rites. While developing content for an audience that is culturally different, we also need to look at these factors. The simplest way to ensure that you don’t falter on these is to read as much about the new culture as you can. Watch some movies, read some magazines, and check their portals. I find portals to be great resources when it comes to information about street-culture.

I once worked on a Malaysian project that gave me some insights on content development for diverse cultures. As you know Malaysia is home to people of Malay, Chinese, and Indian origins; and Islam is the predominant religion in the country.

While creating content and developing courses for Malaysian schools we followed an approach where we eliminated all references to things that were acceptable to one culture but may be unacceptable to another. This was the preferred approach as the Malaysian culture, much like Indian culture, has an objective learning style, where it’s believed that learning (which is a formal process) should not be connected to any thing, which is personal. This belief is quite helpful in multi-cultural settings, as it ensures that education, national festivals, and other interactions of a general nature do not give rise to altercations.

In the Malaysian project we also learned a few things the hard way. Here’s an example of wrong usage of symbols. We assumed that the Red Cross symbolizes the medical profession everywhere. It isn’t so in Malaysia and probably in most Islamic nations. This led to some changes that we had to make when we had almost completed a course.

The spoken language may also cause some drama in an ID’s life when she is writing dialogs. Before you begin to write dialogs for your script, make sure that you’ve spent some time watching and hearing the way language is spoken in other cultures. Most often than not, it’s English; but then the English may be Australian, British, American, Indian, and so on. While writing dialogs have the profile that you’ve created for your character, right in front of you.

In a training that I conducted recently, I was faced with the challenge of talking to an extremely varied audience (different age-groups, both artistically as well as scientifically inclined, experienced in areas as diverse as graphic-designing to engineering) on a topic as specific as Instructional Design.

This training exposed me to a very important sub-culture that we all need to address some time or the other. It is the corporate sub-culture. Each company, willingly or unwillingly, grows to build a culture of its own. When we write for them, we need to keep in mind the existence of this culture too. An insight into this sub-culture can be gained by interacting with the employees of the company you are creating content for.

Do you see? The Instructional Designer leads a thrilling life. She is constantly living on the verge of being detected as an alien in a new culture…and all she can trust is her instinct!

Author: Shafali R. Anand