Impact of cultural diversity on students’ learning behavioral patterns in open and online courses: a lag sequential analysis approach

Abstract

ABSTRACT Online and open learning has recently been made prevalent in many regions in order to mitigate educational inequality and to enhance students’ learning experiences and outcomes. Previous studies showed that students perform differently in the learning process, where cultural differences matter. However, little is known about how cultural differences affect students’ learning behavioral patterns. This study applies a lag sequential analysis approach to understand the behavioral patterns in an online six-week course of 262 students from three cultures, namely Confucian (for Chinese students), Arab (for Tunisian students), and Serbian (for Serbian students). This study then discusses the different learning behavior patterns based on the theoretical framework of Hofstede’s National Cultural Dimensions (NCD). The obtained results highlighted that students from each culture behave differently due to several interconnecting factors, such as educational traditions. The results also showed that some of the learning behaviors were not in line with their students’ cultures based on NCD, calling for further investigation in this regard. Finally, the results pointed out that culture is a complex dimension, and further investigation is needed to understand the other dimensions that may affect online and open learning behaviors.