Collaborative academic work as a power strategy for an inclusive e-learning education

Online education (E-Learning) in Latin America, by one side, has been developed widely in the last decade, and also is relevant how educative platforms have obtained significant advances adding innovating technical devices within educational environments such as second life, wimba, e-books, e-boards, etc., that have facilitated students wide access to processes of learning. But in the other side, this type of education has demonstrated some fragmentary advances in the field of didactics, cultural and social curricular adaptation to particular learning communities. Generally, e-learning in Mexico has been oriented by constructivism rhetoric as the main educational approach, while the philosophy and teleology of online education shows clearly a behaviorism background, which it might be more interested in the reproduction of practices instead of intercultural leaning possibilities. The curricular design for these courses, mainly, has done without the participation of scholars and students. This research focuses in the limits that online education has in building an intercultural students and teachers learning community at the universities in Mexico, in a period of 2006-2009. We use a qualitative and a phenomenological approach in order to analyze the different experiences the students and teachers have in facing the curricular and didactic designs of online education and the difficulties and opportunities of socialization while learning and producing knowledge. © 2010 IEEE