CULTURAL EFFECTS ON DISTANCE LEARNING APPLICATIONS: A COMPARISON OF LONG TERM ORIENTED AND SHORT TERM ORIENTED CULTURES

We focus on Global Software Development from the users ’ perspective and find that cultural differences impact IS success. With ever expanding globalization, applications are increasingly being accessed by culturally diverse groups. Many times this was not planned by the developers who designed the applications for an assumed homogeneous population Thus, software developers need to take into account the cultural differences of their potential users. This is especially true for Distance Learning (DL) applications in which geographical boundaries virtually disappear. This study focuses on DL applications to demonstrate that culture matters in software development. In this study we use rarely applied cultural dimension of long-term orientation (Hofstede & Bond, 1988; Hofstede