The Effect of Student-Lecturer Cultural Differences on Engagement in Learning Environments - A Pilot Study

Abstract

Recently, virtual reality has taken part in various fields such as education, where virtual reality is used for creating virtual interactive learning environments such as virtual lectures. Culture difference is an effective factor in the learning environment. It affects the students’ learning outcome, thus, it is needed to be taken into consideration when designing a virtual learning environment. In this work, we aim to take the initial step in investigating the effect of cultural differences between lecturers and students. We conducted a study where Egyptian students who attended lectures with both Egyptian and German lecturers took different questionnaires. Students answered the Big Five-Inventory 10 (BFI-10) questionnaire, Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM), and designed questions about the impact of student-lecturer cultural differences on students’ engagement experience in lectures. Our results showed a significant difference in the valence emotions of students (p = .023) in the SAM questionnaire which indicated that Egyptian students thought they were happier in Egyptian lectures over the German ones. We found low correlations with the Big Five Personality traits which were a good indicator of the independence of these personality traits. Finally, more than 50% of participants would be interested in customizing their lecturer’s culture as their own culture in an online educational platform. This experiment can pave the road for developers and researchers to have more understanding of new factors that can be included when designing a virtual learning environment.