Learning environments’ new clothes – or how to localise e-learning?

Image by Wonderlane

Today I attended a Cross-cultural User Experience Seminar at Tampere University of Technology. The approach of the seminar was mainly from the viewpoint of product design and international marketing. There were really interesting talks about user experience studies in different sides of the globe, such as Korea, Jordan, Brazil and Tanzania. Although I’m no designer, I found the ideas useful and listened to the presentations with great interest.

The speakers introduced many viewpoints, but they all seemed to agree on two things:

1) Cross-cultural design and localisation are crucial for the product to be well received in different cultures
2) There is no clear set of guidelines how the localisation should be done, all designers must consider the cultural aspect from the starting-point of their product and according to the situation.

During the seminar, I started to think about the business of localisation and cultural issues in terms of education and especially e-learning. If web services and user interfaces of commercial products require careful and insightful localisation – if this is ignored, the marketing results might be catastrophic – why wouldn’t this apply to e-learning tools? How are cultural issues taken into consideration when designing an online learning environment and e-learning modules?

I work as a project manager for a teacher education development project with University of Dar es Salaam, and I’ve seen a Tanzanian adaptation of Moodle being used in a way very familiar to me, although the cultural differences between Finland and Tanzania otherwise are extensive. The sight of the learning environment I know so well was like a touch of home in Africa – I know this sounds stupid but that’s how it felt! Only the colours were different; whereas here in Finland we tend to be very reserved with our colour choices (our university’s Moodle is greyish blue), the Tanzanian version shined with sunny earth colours. I had expected the differences to be deeper than that!

Gilbert Cockton introduced a research by PhD student Leonard Mengo of Jomo Kenyata University, Kenya. He had got some interesting results on the importance of cultural markers in educational material in electronic educational material. Mr Mengo had tested two versions of the exact same study material on management with Kenyan students: the original version was produced in the UK, but he made a Kenyan adaptation of it by changing nothing but colours, images, music, voice-overs and other cultural markers. The content and structure remained untouched. The result was that the Kenyan version was better received by the students – however, the UK version was not disadvantaged either. The cultural markers had a positive effect, but not a dramatic one.

It’s like with the Tanzanian Moodle. There are cultural markers present, but the content and the learning process are the same as in its Finnish cousin. The students’ behaviour doesn’t seem much different. Is the process of learning something so inherited in us, so deeply carved in our dna that it’s just something that needs no localisation? Or has the concepts of “school” and “studying” become universally rooted in our collective memory? Well, maybe I’ll find I’m totally wrong when the Tanzanian students start with the study programme we’re now developing.

Then I came to think of something that makes us see the localisation business in a whole different light: what about the localisation of social media applications? What about Facebook and MySpace? They are hugely popular all over the world, with not much localisation apart from language translations. Facebook has more than 300 million active users, out of whom 70% are from outside the US where the application was developed.

What is it that makes these sites gain such amazing popularity that most designers can only dream about? Surely it’s not an outstanding usability or extraordinary technology? To be honest, from time to time their usability leaves quite a deal to be desired. It has to be something else.

When digging a bit deeper we’ll see the groundbreaking difference between the observations on Moodle and other learning modules and Facebook or other social media applications. It’s exactly the opposite.

Whereas with Moodle the wrapping is localised but the content remains the same, with Facebook the wrapping is similar but the content is always localised. Not just localised, personalised. It’s always localised, because people create it themselves. Therefore it’s always relevant in its context. The same goes for tools like MySpace, or WordPress, or any other social media application. It’s brilliant, isn’t it.

Imagine the impact of such rich resources on education! Instead of standard ways of organising standard information in a linear format you can have a flexible forum suitable for different cultural needs.

Am I getting carried away? You know, I have just been accused of being a “naive technology believer” by a colleague – and I don’t want to claim that the development of social media tools would solve all problems and bring peace to the world. But I am claiming that the impact this development has already had and will have on human behaviour is dramatic. I think this is one more aspect to prove it.