Incorporating Cultural Factors into the Design of Technology to Support Teamwork in Higher Education

Online teamwork is an instructional strategy widely used in education courses to ensure active knowledge construction and deeper learning. There is a challenge for online course designers and technology designers to create group environments that encourage participation, and have the ability to enhance positive attitudes toward group work. It is hypothesised that incorporating cultural factors into the design of teamwork technology has the potential to encourage participation and increase students’ positive attitudes towards group work. This paper looks to do exactly that, although the definition of culture in this paper is limited to the individualism–collectivism dimension. The paper summarises our findings from interviews conducted with lecturers and students who have experience with teamwork. It then presents culturally-related design strategies which are identified from cross-cultural psychology literature and our interviews finding. Finally, it demonstrates how culturally-related design strategies are incorporated into the IdeasRoom prototype design