Influence of Culture on the design process of online learning environments

Culture is a critical influential factor in online learning environments. In the present scenario a designer from a particular cultural background conceptualizes a globalized educational product to be delivered across geographical boundaries through the online medium. Design of such products is influenced by the designer's pre-suppositions about how he / she visualizes the reality and conceptualizes the system. Similarly the end users visualize the system according to their own pre-suppositions. In this paper, we discuss the role played by culture in the design of cross cultural educational products and how it influences the acceptance and usability of a globalized online learning environment. For this study 17 publications have been selected based on how various layers of cultural meta-models can be related to design morphology, to understand whether levels of culture affects learning systems in the same way in which it influences other online systems and to analyze whether subjective cultural issues should be preferred more by user interface designers over the objective cultural issues or its the vice-versa, while designing cross-cultural online learning systems. In this paper a framework has been prepared which relates layers of cultural meta-models to various design morphologies. The review indicates that learning systems are complex due to various levels of communication and group behaviors between the students and their tutors which are influenced by cultural dimensions. Hence the authors suggest that although objective culture should be considered but subjective culture should be given prime importance. The review is intended to help user interface designers understand cultural dimensions that affect various levels of the learning system and identify variables that can be used while designing a cross cultural online learning system.