Blended Learning for Intercultural Competence: A Case Study in Engineering Education

Abstract

This chapter presents a case study on a global educational initiative titled iPodia Program that addresses the quality access to intercultural competency through blended learning. The iPodia Program was firstly initiated by the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California, USA, and now has grown into an alliance with 14 universities across the world. Guided by a socio-technical framework of engineering education and Bloom’s taxonomy, the program created a flipped learning approach with a novel integration of videoconferencing technology, a learning management system, and classroom teaching. The approach included a series of online and face-to-face activities that allowed students to interact across space and time and work collaboratively for meaning negotiation. With these activities, the approach strived to move students from surface to deep learning and nourished global perceptiveness. By examining the program design and student feedback, the study identified various levels and dimensions of intercultural competency development, as well as how the instructional design made the respective development possible. Based on the case analysis, it showed how a blended learning approach can be leveraged in engineering education for intercultural competency development. Limitations and implications of this approach are also discussed.

11.1 Introduction

The blended learning, by integrating online and face-to-face learning, is believed to be advantageous in extending the student engagement and fostering deep learning (Bonk & Graham, 2012; Lim & Wang, 2016). Inspired by its strength, postsecondary educators have been exploring its application in the global and intercultural education, especially when there are multiple cohorts of students who are physically dispersed (e.g., Guth & Helm, 2010; Hilliard, 2015; Liu, Morrison, & Lu, 2015). Traditionally, these student cohorts are oftentimes connected via videoconferencing or Internet for synchronous or asynchronous communication (Beldarrain, 2006; Çiftçi, 2016). These traditional approaches have been proven difficult in boosting interpersonal collaboration and fostering group attachment (Kreijns, Kirschner, & Jochems, 2003; Lawson, Comber, Gage, & Cullum-Hanshaw, 2010; So & Brush, 2008). From this perspective, the blended learning approach might help solve this problem by creating a “glocal” paradigm: the online tools allow globally distributed students to interact in a more flexible and collaboration-friendly way, while the face-to-face interaction among the co-located students helps create a sense of groupness and belonging.

Despite its potential, the blended learning has not been fully exploited in the global and intercultural education, where the instructional design yet to be specified and evaluated. Most of the former ICT-based intercultural programs were developed in the setting of language education and liberal arts subjects, with few situated in the STEM areas (Çiftçi, 2016). At the same time, considering the global outsourcing and multicultural workplace in the twenty-first century, there has been a call to prepare engineering students with relevant soft skills, such as the intercultural competency (National Academy of Engineering, 2004; Royal Academy of Engineering, 2007). Such a call seems to contradict with the technical nature of engineering subjects. To resolve this tension, more efforts are needed to explore how to integrate the intercultural competency development to the teaching and learning in the engineering education. To address the above issues, we present a case study of the iPodia Educational Program for intercultural competency in the field of engineering education. This iPodia Program was first developed in the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), USA. The development of this program was guided by a socio-technical framework of engineering education and Bloom’s taxonomy, which sought to foster meaningful, active, and deep learning among students. The program was designed with a special pedagogy, which was based on a novice integration of information and communication technology and a series of learning activities. Through this program, students were expected to engage in interactive and collaborative learning for enhanced understandings and deep knowledge about cultures.

11.2 Literature Review

For a long time, the postsecondary engineering programs are featured with a great amount of mathematics and technical courses, indicating an emphasis on the “hard,” cognitive skills (Grasso & Burkins, 2010). In recent years, due to the globalization in the supply chain and distribution, engineers are expected to have a strong technical capability but also skills in communication and teamwork on a global scale (Colvin & Edwards, 2018; De Graaff & Ravesteijn, 2001). In response, the engineering education has been experiencing a paradigm shift from the technical-oriented to the socio-technical perspective that also addresses student understandings of social and cultural issues on a global scale. Such a shift is evident in the changing curriculum and accreditation criteria of postsecondary engineering programs. For instance, both the Accrediting Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET, 2018) and the European Network for Engineering Education (EURANEE, 2015) urge that engineering students need to “consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts.” One of the major goals for the socio-technical perspective of engineering education is to train globally and interculturally prepared students (Lohmann, Rollins, & Joseph Hoey, 2006), that is, the development of intercultural competency. Intercultural competency refers to the knowledge, skill, and attitude to appropriately interact in the intercultural encounters (Deardorff, 2006). It includes multiple components, such as the cultural-specific information, cultural self-awareness, sociolinguistic awareness, and deep cultural knowledge. As students gain more information about cultural facts, they are more likely to have a transformation in their awareness and attitudes, as well as more sophisticated and insightful understandings about cultures (Bennett, 2009; Deardorff, 2009). Nowadays intercultural competency is deemed as a competency required for engineers to succeed in the twenty-first century. It can provide engineers a reference framework to “make accurate predictions and attributions’ in intercultural situations (Wiseman, 2002), and therefore, to “ensure cultural acceptance of proposed engineering solutions” (NAE, 2018). As indicated in the socio-technical perspective, intercultural competency, which is oftentimes seen as a domain-general skill, is not a stand-alone subject in the context of engineering education (Lohmann et al., 2006). Instead, the teaching of intercultural competency should be combined with the domain-specific knowledge, where the nature of the subject matter should be taken into account (Grandin & Hedderich, 2009). For example, in comparison with algebra and number theory that is abstract and based on “hard” science, subjects such as engineering design and production development that are closely tied to the end users or customers seem to be more suitable to contextualize the teaching of IC and socio-technical understandings (Jing & Lu, 2011; Lu & Cai, 2001; Lu & Liu, 2011). For example, the technical solutions in software engineer and production development greatly rely on customer’s demand and preference and are eventually tested by the customers. As such, the teaching of IC should be aligned with the subject matters, and it is pertinent to consider the nature of domain-specific learning in the respective instructional design. The digital technology has long been deployed as a powerful tool for the intercultural competency development (e.g., Dai, 2019; Jin & Erben, 2007; Lee, 2007; O’Dowd, 2000; O’Dowd, 2006). Enabled by the technology, globally distributed students are brought together in virtual space for intercultural interaction, through which they are expected to develop understandings and knowledge about their own and other cultures (Deardorff, 2006). Nevertheless, Çiftçi (2016), in a systematic review of these efforts, found that the growth of student understandings centered on superficial information about similarities and differences across cultures, with limited deep cultural knowledge or insightful cross-cultural interpretations. He further argued that the development of intercultural knowledge was not only to learn about cultural similarities and differences but more importantly, to analyze, evaluate, and interpret cultures for deep understandings. That is, the current competency model that is oriented to the fact-based information should be transformed into a more constructive approach that eventually nourishes deep knowledge and insights about cultures (Dasli & Diaz, 2016; Nagata, 2006).

To support such transformation, we draw upon Bloom’s taxonomy which classifies the cognitive activities and learning objectives into levels of complexity and mastery. According to Bloom’s taxonomy, learning takes place in a continuum of cognitive activities including remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating, where learners move from surface to deep learning (cf. Anderson et al., 2001; Bloom, 1956). At the stage of surface learning, learners are most likely to only identify, absorb, and memorize new ideas. But the process of deep learning, in which students are more likely to integrate and construct new ideas and understandings, usually takes place via a highly collaborative, integrative, and reflective process (e.g., Beattie IV, Collins, & McInnes, 1997). It is noted, however, that the deep learning can’t be simply seen as preferable or superior than the surface learning. The lower-level learning can build basic skills and lay a foundation for high-level cognitive skills, while learning at higher levels can reinforce and enhance the lower-level skills. From this perspective, student learning is not a one-way linear process but an iterative and recursive process where they go through various levels of cognitive activities, moving from the fact-based and content-oriented surface learning towards the analytical, critical, and reflective learning.

As educators search for practical tools to move students from surface to deep learning, the notion of flipped learning has gained prominence (Brame, 2013; O’Flaherty & Phillips, 2015; Zainuddin & Halili, 2016). The flipped learning, as an offshoot of blended learning, is a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and coursework in a course are reversed. Students view short videos of lectures or other content materials asynchronously before the class session. Then instructors guide students by answering their questions and helping them apply and reflect on the contents for clarification and deep understandings. In this teaching model, students are supposed to take up the responsibility of mastering concepts on their own time and space, so they can come to the class session with a prepared mind. Then the in-class time is used for active and collaborative learning, where instructors can incorporate more interactive activities such as discussions, project-based or problem-based assignments, and others. In this way, the class session, which has been traditionally used to lecture facts and contents, is now devoted to orient students to step forward and engage in a higher level of cognitive activities.

The recent development in learning technologies has created great convenience for instructors to adopt and implement the flipped classroom in their courses (Beetham & Sharpe, 2013; Duhaney & Zemel, 2000). However, it is still challenging to realize the preferred learning outcomes among students, and there is no one best way to plan an active, collaborative learning experience in the flipped classroom. The question is how to design the instructional plan that works best for a particular group of students learning particular subject matters, specifically, how to align the pre-class and in-class activities and forge the focused and progressive process towards deep learning (Dai, 2019; Hertel, Geister, & Konradt, 2005). As most likely such a progressive learning process won’t take place naturally, it needs proper scaffolding and purposeful intervention from the instructor or peers with expertise.

11.3 The Design and Development of iPodia Program

11.3.1 Historical Background

Guided by the socio-technical perspective and goal in intercultural competency development, the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) in the USA initiated the iPodia Porgram in 2009. The first pilot iPodia course was launched in the same year between the USC and Peking University in China, which was also the first member university in the program. Till today, the iPodia Program has established a partnership with 14 universities on the four continents for the joint curriculum development and collaborative course offering. All the member universities are research universities, with a population ranging from 15,000 to 30,000 undergraduate students.

The technology-enabled course is the major output from the iPodia Program. The courses focus on socio-technical subjects within the engineering fields, such as engineering design thinking and product development, where sociocultural factors (e.g., customer preference, social trends, cultural value) play a significant role in engineering problem solving and decision making. Every course is participated by at least two universities from differentiated cultural contexts, with 15–25 students from each university. The class is usually led by a chief instructor from one university or co-taught by instructors from multiple universities. Most of these courses are conducted in English and exclusive to engineering undergraduates. In all the courses, students register in their home universities, and there is no exchange of tuition fees and credits across universities. Besides, a program officer at the USC facilitates the cross-site collaboration and manages the day-to-day operation, while the local administrative team in member universities manages the onsite logistics.

11.3.2 The Instructional Design

To fulfill the learning objectives, the iPodia Pedagogy has been designed to guide the teaching and learning process in the courses (Lu, 2018). The iPodia Pedagogy follows a weekly flipped learning cycle, as demonstrated in Fig. 11.1. The learning cycle includes the pre-class and the class sessions, in which there are respective learning environments and activities.

Fig. 11.1

The iPodia Pedagogy – a flipped learning cycle

As shown in Fig. 11.1, the learning cycle starts with pre-class learning, which is supported by a specially developed learning management system, named the iPodia P2P Platform. In the platform, there are basic functions such as the administration, material delivery, and communication, along with a peer-to-peer interaction zone. All the students in the iPodia courses are required to register an account in this platform and provide their demographic information, including gender, majors, university affiliation, and so on.

The pre-class session lasts for 6 days in total, during which students are required to participate in a series of activities:

• The pre-class learning starts when the instructor posts the self-study materials on the platform, usually in the format of PowerPoint slides, lecture videos, and readings. In making the materials, the instructor organizes the content into several key concepts, so students have a clear road map to follow. During the 3-day self-study, students need to do an online quiz to provide their feedback. The quiz includes two kinds of questions: first, the knowledge-based questions to examine students’ learning outcome of the material content and second, the preference question in which students rank their interests to discuss these key concepts. The quiz is not graded, so students would feel more comfortable to provide honest feedback.

• Following the self-study is the 3-day team discussion. Based on the self-study feedback from quizzes, students are assigned into small teams for peer-to-peer discussion, usuaully in a group size of 4 to 5 students. The team formation is based on a unique algorithm developed by the iPodia Program that automatically computerizes students’ understanding levels, preferences, and university affiliation for optimized outputs: firstly, the team members’ differences in the knowledge levels and university affiliation are maximized, so all the students are placed in a multicultural environment where the peer tutoring is possible; secondly, the members’ difference in the discussion preference is minimized, so those with similar preference are placed in a team. In the platform, each team is provided with a private space for text-based and videoconferencing meeting, where the focal key concepts, along with a discussion prompt, are given. The prompt, which is programmed in the discussion space, guides students via a series of questions to connect the key concepts to their everyday lives and reflect on how the key concept is manifested in a particular culture. The guided discussion, by forging the peer learning, is to elicit the cultural diversity of students for collaboratively learning about the socio-cultural topics and growing their intercultural competency.

After the 6-day pre-class session, students attend the class session in their local classrooms which are connected via the videoconferencing technology. The local administrative team arranges their classroom space following the same design, as demonstrated in Fig. 11.2 (Dai, 2019; Lu, 2018). Figure 11.2 exemplifies the conceptual design of classroom layout when there are three participating universities. In each classroom, there are three screens of the equal size, to project the lecture slide, the instructor, and the combined live streams of two remote classrooms.¹ A number of cameras and microphones are installed to capture and transmit the live stream of audio and video. With the abundant table microphones, the class activities are made more accessible for students. Besides the videoconferencing facilities for classroom connection, students have personal desktops or tablets for in-class team interaction. Both the videoconferencing and computer connection are supported by the WebEx software.

Fig. 11.2

The classroom layouts. (Reprinted from Dai, 2019, with permission from Elsevier)

The class session is dedicated to enhancing students’ knowledge of key concepts as well as intercultural understandings. Before the class session, the teaching assistant analyzes students’ pre-class input for the instructor’s reference. The analyses include the following: first, students’ pre-class quizzes are collected and analyzed to identify the learning gaps and student confusions; second, the team discussion is analyzed using the natural language processing techniques to identify the patterns of peer learning, such as the frequency of student participation, the popular topics, the most adored answers, and so on. The analyses are to facilitate the instructor’ lesson preparation, so he or she can tailor the class activities accordingly.

Usually the instructor organizes the three kinds of in-class activities:

• The instructor usually starts with summarizing and commenting the pre-class session. Based on the analysis of student quizzes, he uses visual presentations of descriptive statistics to show the distribution of student responses and highlight the misconceptions. Departing from the pre-class progress, he orients the class to discuss these concepts and clarify the confusion.

• The instructor also selects and highlights some topics or posts from the team discussion for the class. There are two selection criteria: (1) the richness of student contribution, which indicates how much, if any, students find the topics relevant and meaningful, and (2) the heuristic value, referring to its potential in assisting students in making meaningful connection and discoveries. In extracting the team discussion for the classroom interaction, the instructor hopes to create a more inclusive and engaging space for in-depth interaction.

• Beyond mastering the concepts, the instructor seeks to engage students in applying, analyzing, and evaluating the key concepts and theories. To fulfill this purpose, the instructor designs some stand-alone or semester-long activities that require higher-order cognitive activities. Such activities are oftentimes highly collaborative and analytical, including the case study, debate, personal sharing and presentation, reflections, and so on. In doing these activities, students are no longer discussing whats of the key concepts but more about hows and whys.

11.3.3 Program Evaluation

Since the pilot course in 2009, the iPodia Program has been continually (re)designed and improved its technological envrironment and instructional practices under the overarching framework of iPodia Pedagogy. To trace its development and evaluate its effectiveness, the program office at the USC conducts the program evaluation research project every year. The research project was jointly conducted by an interdisciplinary team of engineering educators and educational researchers to examine and evaluate the teaching and learning in the iPodia courses. The major methods deployed in this project were classroom observation and teaching evaluation survey. While the classroom observation was primarily to examine how the instructional design was unfolded and enacted, the teaching evaluation was to directly elicit student opinions about their first-hand experiences.

All the participating students were invited to fill in the survey anonymously. It included both quantitative and qualitative questions. The quantitative part was five-point Likert scale questions, in which students indicated their degree of satisfaction with the courses in multiple dimensions, such as the overall course, learning contents, and evaluation scheme. The quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics. In the qualitative part, students were asked to share the new understandings or transformation they had gained in terms of intercultural communication, subject matters, and other learning objectives. In answering these questions, students were also encouraged to point out the problems and issues, as well as suggesting possible solutions. The collected qualitative data was analyzed using thematic coding to identify and extracting themes from texts (Gibbs, 2007). Given the focus of this chapter, Deardorff’s framework (2006) and Bloom’s taxonomy (1956) were used as the initial code lists, to identify student development in various dimensions of intercultural competency at the surface or deep levels.

11.4 Findings on Student Satisfaction and Development

The analyses and findings of student experiences and development in the iPodia courses were demonstrated in the following two themes. The account of each theme was built upon the quantitative and qualitative data from the teaching evaluation survey, along with the analyses of respective instructional practices.

11.4.1 A General Development in Fact-Based Understandings and Cultural Awareness

Figure 11.3 shows the average ratings of students’ overall satisfaction with the iPodia courses from 2009 to 2018. The average rating stayed above 4.39 out of 5. It indicated that most of the students had participated in the intercultural interaction with positive feelings, although there were some varying voices. As shown in the qualitative responses, students generally enjoyed the mediated intercultural commutation, through which they had obtained extensive facts and information about other cultures. Especially, such understandings were developed with the help from peers, that is, the real insiders of the target cultures, which greatly enhanced the feeling of authenticity and closeness.

Fig. 11.3

The overall satisfaction of students during 2009 and 2018

The reported growth in the fact-based understandings about specific cultures responded to the surface learning that students had gone through. Students claimed that they had exchanged and learned intensively about what people did in cultural contexts, such as their everyday lives, mentalities, high- and low-brow cultures, and other cultural-specific information. Such exchange had stimulated them to compare the similarity and difference across cultures, leading to their increasing awareness of cultural diversity. Some students even reported an emerging interest to study or work abroad after graduation. It is noted that this general growth in cultural facts was somehow superficial, as the majority of exchanges were information about what people did. But these surface-level understandings had proven helpful, not only in increasing their intercultural understandings but also triggering an attitude change or forging a positive attitude towards other cultures to a certain extent.

Meanwhile, students agreed that the blended learning approach in the iPodia courses had greatly contributed to their overall development of intercultural knowledge. While the grouping algorithm ensured the multicultural composition of all the teams, it opened a window for students to different cultures. The team-based interactive space created a sense of privacy and closeness among members, where students felt safe to exchange ideas and build up interpersonal connections. Through the discussion, students were engaged in a purposeful, structured, and focused process of applying the key concepts in their own cultural contexts, sharing cultural-specific examples with peers, comparing and evaluating various interpretations. Such an exchange might look trivial and fragmentary but provided concrete images about a cultural phenomenon. Especially, guided by the discussion prompt, what students learned were not general traits or stereotypes of cultures but meaningful and understandable experiences that they could relate themselves to. As for the class session, the videoconferencing connection created a public and inclusive space accessible for all the students. While students attended the lectures in their local classrooms, they stayed in their own cultural groups and were less likely to feel isolated. Many of them felt more comfortable and confident and were willing to speak out and shared their personal experiences and thoughts.

11.4.2 Enhanced Intercultural Understandings and Deep Cultural Knowledge

Beyond the fact-based understandings, students demonstrated varying degrees of development in deep cultural knowledge. Departing from the fact-based understandings about cultural similarity and difference, many students continued to reflect and investigate the underlying logics and reasons. In this way, the fact-based understandings were turned into learning resources that triggered their active and deep learning. Such enhanced learning was evident in many dimensions, such as the sociolinguistic awareness and deep knowledge of culture. For example, several American students reportedly had learned that Chinese and Koreans peers expressed disagreement in a more implicit way and tended to avoid the confrontation, which was due to the value of being humble and modest in the East Asian culture. The identified patterns of behavior, along with the impact of cultural values, were based on students’ interpretation of cultural differences. This understanding went beyond the whats of cultural facts and indicated a step forward to the hows and whys, which can be seen as deep cultural knowledge.

At the same time, more in-depth changes in attitudes and behaviors were identified. The following quote from the student survey exemplified such a change:

My most rewarding experience was discovering and overcoming cultural differences. I learned a lot about the difference between American culture with the Chinese and Korean cultures. Initially, I made many cultural assumptions that were later challenged and overturned by my teammates.

The mediated intercultural interaction exposed students to cultural differences and triggered them to identify what led to such differences. To fully understand the differences, students had to give up their assumptions and shifted their viewpoints of others (Dai, Lu, & Liu, 2019). In taking up others’ viewpoints, they broke down their cultural stereotypes and transited from ethnocentrism and ethnorelativisim. This transition can shed a profound impact on student attitude towards their own and other cultures or even led to fundamental changes to their everyday lives (Dai, 2019).

The enhanced, deep knowledge was made possible by the flipped learning in the iPodia courses. Thanks to the pre-class sessions, the in-class time was used for collaborative learning, such as group discussion and team projects. Especially, considering that students in different universities were quite likely to have different schedules and lifestyles, it could be difficult for them to find a meeting time that worked for all. Under this constraint, the in-class activities resolved the schedule conflicts and made sure that all the students were provided opportunities for intensive, immediate interaction. The in-class teamwork was greatly appreciated by students, as shown in the following quote:

It challenged students to work with people in different countries in a virtual environment. It’s not like you were having a language partner to practice English nor working on a course project with students on the same campus. It’s the whole package, need to manage the challenge from all aspects.

In addition, the learning of subject matters (i.e., the socio-technical topics) and intercultural learning had constituted a double-loop learning for students. On the one hand, learning the socio-technical subjects enhanced students’ intercultural understandings. For example, when students shared relevant examples and cases in explaining and applying the concepts, they were also sharing the cultural-specific information and engaged in a co-construction process to identify the cultural diversity and difference. Especially, in learning about how the technical solutions would interact with social and cultural dimensions, students gained knowledge about the processes and practices related to special social groups and individuals, along with their insider perspectives (Czerwionka, Artamonova, & Barbosa, 2015). On the other hand, the intercultural interaction prompted the deep learning about engineering subjects. This positive effect was evident in their team and classroom discussion. The peer interaction had catalyzed the active and creative exploration of key concepts and supported their collaborative negotiation for deep understandings. This negotiation oftentimes involved careful observation and analytical reasoning, where students took up a series of higher-level cognitive activities, leading to a deeper understanding of the content knowledge.

11.5 Limitations and Discussion

This chapter presented a case study of the iPodia Program to demonstrate how the blended learning approach can be adopted to promote the intercultural competency in the engineering education. By integrating the Internet, videoconferencing, and face-to-face interaction, the program designed a flipped learning cycle where students were engaged in a sequence of immersive and interactive activities to develop both an understanding of subject contents as well as intercultural competency. Especially, benefited from the sequential learning, students were oriented to move from remembering and mastering the concepts to more comprehensive and critical understandings. Through this process, the learning of socio-technical engineering subjects and intercultural competency enhanced and reinforced each other, together promoting the growth of deep understandings.

Despite its effectiveness, there are several limitations with the iPodia Pedagogy, implying directions for future improvement. A major complaint from the students was the workload in the weekly learning cycle, along with the technical issues. As there are multiple tasks imposed on students throughout the 7 days in a week, students had to frequently check up the learning platform to keep up with the activity flow; otherwise they would be lagged behind or feel out of the loop. Many students viewed it as intensive and stressful, even felt challenging to commit the expected input. One possible solution proposed by students was to develop a mobile application of iPodia Platform, so they can access it via smartphones in a more flexible and convenient way. They also suggested the reminder or alarm function for the application development, which can help users keep track of dues and tasks.

The complaint about the workload was not only from students but also from instructors. As all the iPodia courses were expected to follow the iPodia Pedagogy, instructors needed to devote a large amount of time to prepare learning materials and activities, such as recording the video lectures, making the PowerPoint slides, and design in-class projects and activities. In comparison with traditional teaching, the workload was much heavier in teaching the iPodia courses, which would hinder the participation and contribution of instructors. To resolve this issue, we suggest developing institutional policy and incentive, to recognize and reward the instructor’s inputs. Besides, the heavy workload implies the complexity of this program. When multiple globally distributed classrooms were connected online for such intensive interaction, the joint course delivery could be difficult to coordinate and organize. For instance, as shown in the two drops of student satisfaction in Fig. 11.3, when they were due to personnel changes and the program manager position was not filled, students criticized the ill-organization of the classes and felt little supports from the teaching team. The student reaction not only showed the importance of course management and coordination but also implied that a more sophisticated mechanism of cross-institutional collaboration is needed, to ensure a stable program operation and maintenance in a long run.