Meeting 26/05/2020: MOOCs and online communication

Hello PEGasus team! COVID-19 has not stopped our meetings. We’re now having our meetings on MS Teams and were very lucky to have Rana Saud Shahini with us in May directly from Saudi Arabia.

Rana discussed her research on cultural representations in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) collaborative activities based in a very international MOOC where she’s been using Baker’s (2011) Intercultural Communication Awareness Model (ICA) for exploring the levels of pedagogic cultural communication amongst the MOOC takers.

Her initial results show that there is little peer interaction in the MOOC’s discussion boards that go beyond expressing single perspectives and ideas. In other words, there is a fair amount of interactions at a very general level with a focus on the first culture – basic cultural awareness (ICA’s level 1), but very little of participants discussing mediation, adaptation, and negotiation in intercultural communication (ICA’s level 3).

Rana believes that ‘transcultural communication may be promoted through multilevel pedagogical activities where different levels are interconnected’, and is now collecting further data to put this to the test in a second run of the same MOOC.

We look forward to hearing more about the next step of your research Rana!