Making Intelligent Tutoring Systems culturally aware: The use of Hofstede's cultural dimensions

摘要

e-Learning is the concept of teaching people through the Internet. By definition, an e-Learning session is not limited by any border, meaning that learners implicated in this session could differ by many criteria which include gender, social classes, religion, nationality, occupation... It has been shown that many of those elements can impact on learning and some are already assessed in e-Learning. However, currently, when an e-Learning system receives a connection call from a user, the system will not make any difference whether this user is French, Chinese, or American... According to cross-cultural studies, culture has a big impact on individuals' cognitive processes and also on how individuals understand and interact with their environment and peers. In this paper, we show that e-Learning systems which want to adapt to their learners and keep them motivated will take huge benefits by considering learners' culture. We present some results from our study which support Hofstede's Individualism/Collectivism scores [Hofstede, 1980]. Based on those results and on cross-cultural studies in management and psychology, we propose different elements of learners' culture that an e-Learning system should consider.