The Impact of Cultural Dimensions on Online Learning

Due to the increasingly multicultural nature of e-learning environments, it is critical that instructors and instructional designers be aware of the importance of cultural factors in education and that they deliver culturally adaptive instruction. The main challenge of this paper is identifying the critical success factors for multicultural online learning from learners’ perceptions and their relationships with the six-dimensional Hofstede cultural model. Specifically, a categorization of the students’ perceptions is proposed by combining multiple correspondence and clustering analyses. To that end, two surveys were conducted in four e-learning universities in four different countries: Spain, the USA, China, and Mexico. Findings from clustering analysis show that learners are categorized according to their autonomy levels at the beginning of the educational process, and they are classified according to their satisfaction levels at the end of the instruction.