I would like to thank my colleagues and project partners for their time and commitment; their exhaustive explanations helped me collect the data for this study. I am particularly grateful to Katerina Zourou for her insightful comments. The study reported here has been supported by the EC-funded project, LangOER: Enhancing teaching and learning of less-used languages through Open Educational Resources and Practices. The information and views set out in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Neither the European Union institutions and bodies nor any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained therein.
1The massive emergence of technologies enabling users to reuse, modify and share content has led educators to open up materials and practices in many areas. The openness paradigm assumes open access to educational resources and public visibility of educational practices and has become a prerequisite for major educational trends of today; including the focus on learner autonomy, the role of peer-to-peer learning and the merging of formal and informal education, as well as the pressing need for life-long learning and equal educational opportunities. Universal access to educational resources and practices is becoming an increasingly important principle underpinning various didactic models, many of them implemented online. Indeed, it is online learning environments that currently serve as the most natural context for resources to be repurposed, remixed, re-published and, finally, delivered to culturally dispersed participants.
2The enormous diversity and editability of OER make them potentially universal in terms of pedagogy and audience since, depending on type, format and the scope of the modification allowed, they can be flexibly reused and adapted to any classroom. McGreal (2013) observes that OER can in fact be neutral in terms of learning theories because they can accommodate either teacher-centred instruction in the form of behavioural online drilling or promote learner-centred collaborative knowledge construction through modifiable web quest scenarios. Ng'ambi and Luo (2013) note that open content is perhaps best viewed as individual pieces designed to be unique entities, created by different people to serve different educational contexts and purposes. In this sense, OER are often advertised as building blocks from which educators can flexibly build a learning environment to fit any specific educational context. With this in mind, it is reasonable to see the promise and quality of OER not as residing inherently in the resources themselves but emerging in the relation between a particular type of material and the way in which it is appropriated and integrated in a given educational context (Conole & Ehlers, 2010; Bateman, Lane & Moon, 2012; King, 2013). Indeed, quality adaptation of OER for local contexts is currently seen as the greatest challenge in the openness movement (Wolfenden, Buckler & Keraro, 2012). Being able to overcome this difficulty can help address problems with sustainability of OER, and this issue is thoroughly investigated by MacKinnon, Pasfield, Grant, and Manns (2016, this issue). As they observe following Downes (2007), sustainability and, thus, longevity of resources is enhanced if their content is flexible and adaptation-friendly.
3In this article I will show that the mere openness of educational content does not guarantee its smooth replication in other, culturally distinct contexts. In the process of cross-cultural adaptation, especially in the field of teacher training, proper attention needs to be given not only to the cultural flavour of local settings, but also to the pedagogical realities, practices and priorities of end-users. This specifically applies to projects promoting transfer of innovation which disseminate mainstream practices and philosophies of learning. As I will argue, in order to maximise the appropriateness of the OER and reduce confusion resulting from how various pedagogical dimensions are interpreted and realised in culturally different communities, educators and content developers need to play an active role in the process of creating and adapting instructional content (Buckler, Perryman, Seal & Musafir, 2014) and should be autonomous in their judgements and decisions about which modifications respond best to their unique contexts.
4With potential for modification being the underlying principle of open educational content, attention needs to be given to situations in which resources created for one cultural context are to be used in another–culturally, pedagogically, technically or even politically different one. Such situations are common in the OER movement for two major reasons: first, the principle of re-use, repurposing and adaptation lies at its very heart and, second, openness is perceived as a means for equalising access to education, especially in developing and culturally distant countries (Atenas & Havemann, 2014). When it comes to the latter, the content is usually created in developed countries and transferred top-down to those in need of pedagogical innovation (see Buckler et al., 2014; Perryman, Buckler & Seal, 2014). If not congruent with end-users' teaching beliefs, values and the local prevailing philosophy of teaching, the novel content or instruction is likely to remain alien and unproductive (Parrish & Linder-VanBerschot, 2010).
5In the context of cross-cultural transfer of content, the concept of localisation or appropriation is increasingly used to refer to the processes of cross-cultural adaptation of learning materials so that they respond to the unique learning and teaching needs of end users with no harm to the original quality of both content and instruction. This sort of culturally relevant modification is needed to assist users, especially teachers, in the gradual acceptance of novel practices (Parrish & Linder-VanBerschot, 2010). Whyte, (2016, this issue) in her study of teacher trainees confirms that teacher training should be "anchored in teacher's own specific teaching contexts". There is substantial evidence that teachers' beliefs, attitudes and personal feelings influence the adoption of new models and technologies. If trainees are instructed in a way which aligns with their pedagogical values, experiences, and daily practices, they are more inclined to accommodate the innovation (Gabillon, 2013; Rolfe, 2012). Moreover, culturally relevant adaptation increases the authenticity of instruction, as tasks which are authentic in a one context may lose their authenticity in another.
6Drawing on the above, it can be assumed that open educational content, created for a given context should not be seen as culturally pre-determined but should lend itself to flexible appropriation to other educational cultures (Collis, 1999; Henderson, 1996). Visser (2007) sees contextualisation and cultural adaptation of educational materials as the major condition for full development of the individual. Parrish and Linder-VanBerschot (2010) report on the possible tensions between making materials culturally universal and the need to accommodate the unique characteristics of local contexts. Thomas, Mitchell and Joseph (2002) emphasise the need for cultural adaptation of both content and instruction. As they put it, "Culture is so much a part of the construction of knowledge that it must underpin not only the analysis phase but all phases of the design process" (Thomas, Mitchell & Joseph, 2002: 4). Rivens Mompean and Guichon (2013) demonstrate that educational materials may remain unexplored if their adaptation is not appropriate. They describe the process of local appropriation of a complex multimedia learning system to culturally different institutions and conclude that despite their "intrinsic qualities" educational resources may remain unexplored if the process of their adaptation is inadequate. As they confirm, full integration into a local educational context is possible if the materials are supported with adequate teaching scenarios and provided they become validated by users and their institutions (Rivens Mompean & Guichon, 2013: 39).
7The most conspicuous contexts for localisation are those which are culturally and geographically distant. Many of them are low-income countries, in which teachers work in resource-deprived settings with limited access to pedagogical innovations. In such contexts, open content is often the only way of equalising educational opportunities for teachers and learners alike. Perryman et al. (2014) describe difficulties associated with localising OER to the culturally and linguistically diverse context of India. They draw attention to issues such as translation challenges, users' lack of pedagogical experience or their unfamiliarity with the OER movement, as well as a range of pedagogy-related difficulties, including users' unfamiliarity with activity-based learning. As the authors explain, the localisation process in such a culturally and linguistically complicated context requires skilled manoeuvring between the original and local pedagogical approaches.
8Both Buckler et al. (2014) and Perryman et al. (2014) confirm that many barriers to cultural appropriation may be socially determined. For instance, they may result from the locally observed hierarchical structures or the culturally grounded concept of knowledge ownership. The facilitators' concerns that new practices interfere with the commonly acknowledged status may prevent their efficient localisation. Both Buckler et al. (2014) and Perryman et al. (2014) support the idea of making OER users collaborate in a collegial community of practice (Wenger, 1998), to assist them in engaging "in mutually beneficial sharing of expertise and contextual understanding" (Perryman et al., 2014: 1). Wolfenden et al. (2012) in a study of applying the TESSA (Teacher Education in Sub Saharan Africa) project in nine countries of Sub Saharan Africa, provide examples of adaptation strategies used for content modification. They enumerate the strategies of replacing names, cultural stories and historical events with culturally relevant ones. The most complex adaptation was that of aligning the resources with the national curriculum; here realised by adding or omitting those which were incongruent. This is in accordance with Beaven, Comas-Quinn, Hauck, de los Arcos and Lewis (2013) who recall that novel content may require changes to contextual elements to guarantee conformity with local history and to incorporate culturally relevant examples.
9Open educational content is usually localised through translation (eg Beaven et al., 2013). As popular as this strategy is, it addresses the most conspicuous cultural differences related to content, while leaving instructional techniques and task design intact. This can be problematic if there exist cultural preferences for how educational content should be selected, organised, modified and, finally, delivered. Indeed, all educational systems are inevitably shaped by their local socio-political cultures (Hall & Hall, 1990; Rubenstein, 2006). In the related literature it is common to point to the permeating role of motivation or collectivistic vs individualistic orientation in the shaping of didactic approaches, classroom atmosphere, formulation of curriculum, and, last but not least, the interactions between teachers and students (eg Hofstede, 1986). For instance, Rubenstein (2006: 436) notes that many Eastern cultures still cultivate traditional teacher-centred classrooms, in which teachers follow a "highly-ordered pattern of classroom activity". Even if those patterns are being gradually replaced with more learner-centred ones, they take years to take root and develop. In their investigation of various pedagogical dimensions of web-based instruction, Reeves and Reeves (1997) warn that pedagogical values, which are seen as central to one culture, may seem culturally inappropriate in another. As they explain, this may refer to the teacher and learner roles, attitudes to collaboration, task orientation or source of motivation. Parrish and Linder-VanBerschot (2010) investigate several aspects of what they term the Cultural Dimension of the Learning Framework (CDLF). They identify social relationships, epistemological beliefs and temporal perceptions as the main areas in which cultural differences can significantly affect instruction.
10The unique qualities of diverse educational contexts may affect learners' response to the training materials, too. For example, trainees whose educational cultures are collectivist rather than individualist will readily embrace collaborative activity in group discussions or project work. On the other hand, participants whose educational cultures favour teacher authority, are more likely to await precise instructions from the teacher even if the task is open and the environment is highly interactive (Liu, Liu & Magjuka, 2010). Culturally different educational backgrounds may also breed various interpretations of seemingly uniform pedagogical concepts, which can be observed in educational contexts in which interaction and collaboration take place between culturally diverse individuals. For example, Müller-Hartmann and Kurek (2016) report on cultural differences in how German and Polish students participating in an online intercultural exchange understood the concept of task design. While German student teachers saw this mainly through the lense of learner-centred activities, promoting the development of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), the Polish participants concentrated on individual teacher-controlled and skill-oriented language activities. In a similar context of intercultural online exchanges, Turula (2015) investigated the impact of high- and low-context specificity (see Hall, 1976) on students' perceptions of telecollaborative tasks. As she found out, students representing high-context cultures interpreted on-task performance in a highly emotional manner, showed overreliance on social relationships and saw feedback as potentially face-threatening. This was in stark contrast with the neutral perception of tasks and feedback represented by low-context telecollaborative partners.
11The current study into cultural appropriation of open content has been set out in the context of the EU-funded project LangOER (Enhancing teaching and learning of less-used languages through Open Educational Resources and Practices). It was conceived to popularise the concept of openness in the context of less-used and less-taught languages, on the assumption that although there exists a bulk of such resources in English and other mainstream languages, smaller, local languages remain underrepresented in the openness movement. The dominant position of English can be perceived as a barrier since, first, the language may not be known to local instructors and, second, the popularity of resources in English may prevent educators from creating the content in other, less popular, languages, leading to one-directional flow of educational content from more to less-developed countries (Glennie, Harley, Butcher & van Wyk, 2012).
12In an attempt to tackle the issue, the LangOER project brought together educators and researchers representing linguistic contexts as diverse as Frisian, Latvian and Latgalian, Swedish, Lithuanian, Polish, Greek and Norwegian. One of the major project activities was therefore the design and delivery of dedicated teacher training courses, equipping local teachers with adequate skills and helping them to develop positive attitudes to open practices. Since openness is more a philosophy than a set of skills, the underlying assumption behind this training was that the objectives could be reached if the instructional content and strategies were in tune with local teachers' beliefs, practices and their local priorities.
13The prototype instructional design was first delivered in a 30-hour piloting master course which, in order to maintain the validity and reliability of instruction, was delivered online via the Open Learning platform (https://www.openlearning.com/courses/goingopenwithlangoer) to a multicultural group of educators, representing various educational contexts and levels of expertise. The course took place in November and December 2015. Its content was structured according to the four stages of openness suggested by Hilton, Wiley, Stein and Johnson (2010) and included:
-
Module 1: Introduction to openness
-
Module 2: Revising and Reusing
-
Module3: Redistributing: Towards open practices
-
Module 4: Remixing: sharing and publishing
14Following the course evaluation, six colleagues were tasked with appropriately transferring the course to fit their national educational contexts. The process of instructional design is illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1–The phases of the process of instructional design: Preparing teachers for openness.
15In order to facilitate the prospective process of local appropriation, the course content was developed in line with the following design principles:
-
a broad choice of pedagogically varied activities, technologies and formats;
-
the modularisation of content;
-
limited use of highly contextual materials (Edmundson, 2007).
16While the prototype instruction was delivered entirely online via the Open Learning platform, the local appropriation had to include in-situ sessions, with the instructors free to decide about the ratio of online and in-class learning.
17The following study concentrates on the local appropriation phase (Phase 4) and the subsequent delivery of culturally adapted content, as depicted in Figure 1. The cascading structure of local appropriation created a unique opportunity to observe how the same online content was appropriated to six culturally different educational settings–some of them perceived as culturally monolithic– (eg Polish, Lithuanian, Greek) and therefore, highly context-specific, whereas others are perceived as multilingual (Latvian/Latgalian, Dutch/Frisian). The target languages included Greek, Dutch/Frisian, Lithuanian, Swedish, Polish and Latvian. All the instructors engaged in instructional design were experienced teacher trainers, knowledgeable of their local educational cultures. All of them had taken part in the piloting course (Phase 3) and were actively involved in the local appropriation of the content and its subsequent delivery (Phase 4), which is the main focus of this study.
18As regards target participants, most local courses were typically attended by certified, experienced teachers, many of whom were language teachers. The most diverse in terms of educational levels and subjects was the Polish group, whose participants represented all levels of education, including pre-school and post-secondary education. Most groups were predominantly female, except for a balanced representation of male and female participants in the Frisian group.
19The research presented here was designed as a small-scale, exploratory study aimed at understanding how the process of OER pedagogical appropriation of open content was understood and navigated in six different European contexts. The exploratory study approach seems particularly adequate for the intended investigation since, so far, few studies have investigated the processes of content appropriation. The data were gathered after the whole round of local courses was complete. The main tool of data collection was a questionnaire distributed to six experienced colleagues involved in the process of the appropriation in question. The questionnaire, (Annex) used mainly open-ended questions following O'Cathain and Thomas's (2004) suggestion that closed questions reflect the researcher's rather than the respondent's perspective. The questions covered the descriptions of the training recipients, guided descriptions of the challenges experienced during the appropriation in the areas of organisation, language adaptation, content, technology and teacher attitudes; the major variations from the prototype and criteria for employing them, as well as the choice of dominant forms of adaptation used. A question in which the instructors were to evaluate their local educational cultures used 5-point continuums on which the respondents were to gauge the perceived intensity of learner centredness, attitudes to sharing, educational innovation, collaborative learning, use of English and technology use. The final question investigated the role of the online component and the dominant instruction techniques for in-situ meetings.
20Apart from the questionnaires, additional data were collected in complementary interviews with some course instructors, as well as through a hands-on investigation of the modified resources available online. All the instructors were native to their local contexts and had extensive experience in teacher training delivery.
21In particular, the study presented here sought to answer the following research questions:
-
How do local instructional designers perceive the pedagogical characteristics of their local educational contexts?
-
What appropriation strategies did the instructors use to address the demands of their local pedagogical cultures?
-
What challenges did the instructors encounter in the process of pedagogical appropriation?
22The data collected in the questionnaires permitted a comparison of how the same set of OER had been adapted to various national contexts. A summary of cultural differences is set out in Figure 2. It shows the diversity of target contexts, as well as the wide range of challenges and local constraints that the educators had to cope with. The sections below will briefly present the major traits.
23The first research question posed in this study addressed the issue of how local instructional designers perceive the pedagogical characteristics of their local educational contexts.
24Drawing on the substantial research into the role of cultural dimensions in affecting teaching and learning, our intention was to capture instructors' perceptions of their educational cultures. The dimensions selected for comparison included those commonly referred to as culturally sensitive and, at the same time, rendered central for modern education and the openness movement. They included 1) learner/teacher centredness; 2) the role of collaborative learning; 3) technology adaptation; 4) attitudes to change and novelty; 5) use of English and 6) attitudes to sharing. For each of the dimensions, the instructors were asked to refer to their teacher training experience and place their choices on a scale ranging from 1, meaning that the particular feature was felt to be underrepresented, to 5, meaning that it was seen as intensely present. The descriptors were provided for the beginning and end values only. The intention was to capture the dominant characteristics of a given educational culture, as seen from an experienced teacher trainer's perspective, but–obviously–it was assumed that within any educational culture, individual teachers could differ in how strongly they aligned with these tendencies. Importantly, the intention was not to provide a generalised picture of particular cultures but, rather, demonstrate the diversity of contexts to which the materials had to be adapted. Figure 2 illustrates the distribution of values attributed to the criteria by local course adaptors. In order to avoid reinforcing cultural bias and stereotyping, each of the local contexts has been anonymised, with letters of the alphabet (A, B, C, D, E, F) replacing particular national contexts.
Figure 2–Instructors' perceptions of their local educational cultures (A, B, C, D, E, F).
The results confirm the initial hypothesis that despite the relative proximity of the cultures and their seemingly uniform European provenience, each of the local contexts for appropriation represents a distinctly different educational culture. The biggest disparities can be seen for learner centredness, with each of the cultures representing it to a different degree. For example, as instructor F admitted, the educational system in culture F is "in transition from teacher-centred to learner-oriented approaches". Instructor C commented that in their educational culture "while adult education is learner-centred indeed, it is more teacher-centred at schools". Similar distribution can be seen in the category of attitudes to collaboration, with culture B being most collaborative-oriented and culture F the least ("Teachers in my country avoid collaborative tasks"). Strong discrepancies can also be seen in relation to the popularity of English. While instructors B and C saw their educational cultures as fluent in English, for the instructor representing culture F, English as a language of educational content was a barrier rather than a facilitation ("English is truly a foreign language here. Very few teachers know it well". Instructor F, questionnaire).25In the context of the training it was important to check whether course facilitators were aware of the local teachers' attitudes to sharing, especially since "it is within consciousness that open practices are enabled" (Peter & Deimann, 2013:10). For example, teachers representing culture C were perceived by the local instructor as ready to embrace the sharing practices, while instructors from educational cultures A, D and F, saw them as less prepared for openness and sharing practices. As instructor A explained: "Adaptation is definitely not common practice, nor is redistribution. Teachers tend to keep materials for themselves or, perhaps, share them with friends". This perception affected instructional design as, in an attempt to instil the openness values in course recipients, some facilitators increased the scope of awareness raising activities, such as discussions or explanatory video materials. In a similar vein, teachers' readiness for technology was prone to cultural differences, with culture F perceived as technology resistant and educational culture B seen as technologically advanced.
26Interestingly, Figure 2 shows that culture B is the most pedagogically advanced of all the educational contexts involved; something which was confirmed by the local facilitator on several occasions. Its teaching community was perceived as conforming with almost all the major educational trends, ie learner-centredness, readiness for collaboration, common fluency in English and positive attitudes towards embracing technology and novelty. Such a sublime pedagogical profile of prospective participants called for radical reorganisation of course content in order to meet their refined needs and expectations, which–indeed–was the strategy undertaken by the facilitator in charge.
27The analysis of the materials created during the appropriation phase, as well as the data collected in the questionnaire, allow the adaptation strategies to be slotted into four major categories: linguistic (eg translation or subtitling), organisational (manipulating the ratio between face-to-face and online sessions), pedagogical (replacing, adjusting tasks and their instructions and replacing content) and technical (eg replacing tools or providing additional tutorials). The instructors were free to choose from these categories depending on their local conditions and their specific affordances and constraints. For example, the low working knowledge of English among teachers from cultures A and F (see Figure 2) forced local instructors to turn to translation (A, F, E), subtitling (D) and content substitution (F) as the major appropriation strategies. On the other hand, partners B and C, in whose pedagogical cultures English is commonly used, opted for content reorganisation and task redesign as dominant forms of appropriation.
28For example, instructor B, inspired by the high level pedagogical content knowledge of her prospective trainees, intuitively decided to capitalise on the distinct features of her local pedagogical culture, in particular the positive attitudes to novelty, collaboration and technology use and engaged teachers in the collaborative development of a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) for the minority language they represented. This decision served as an important motivational factor since, as the instructor explained:
Most of the teachers [in my country] are overwhelmed with course offers which they can join for free (…) and they get the financial compensation for the hours they could spend on their jobs. (…) while with this project, the only tool we had was to trigger their enthusiasm and curiosity (instructor B, questionnaire).
29The strategy of increasing the novelty factor and turning to a "bottom-up crowd-sourcing initiative" in a pedagogically new context of a MOOC turned out to be a very efficient appropriation strategy, resulting in new partnerships being forged with other local educational institutions. It also required modifications in the instruction mode. As instructor B explained:
We had to step back from a (traditional) teacher role and become more of a moderator in the session. This worked better as participants worked more collaboratively and from their own intrinsic motivation (instructor B, questionnaire).
30The data collected in Table 2 also show that nearly all the instructors took an active approach to appropriation and, instead of simple content replication, chose to re-design the prototype tasks by adapting their instructions or technologies. For example, instructor E, who had also authored the master content, decided to develop additional tasks of varying technical complexity in order to address their participants' mixed digital abilities. Partner F, who saw technology adoption in her country as very monotonous ("Using similar tools without any diversity") decided to reduce selected descriptive content to provide teachers with more space for technology instruction and practice ("We had to shorten the content because (…) we wished to assist teachers in learning new digital tools", questionnaire).
31As can be seen, the values given to task amendment strategy are extremely high for all the partners, which proves high autonomy of instructors and their responsiveness to local needs. Table 1 presents the perceived importance of appropriation strategies as reported by local developers. The percentage values represent the weight given to a particular strategy, rather than its actual share, for which reason they do not add up to 100%.
Table 1–The importance of locally used appropriation strategies, as seen by local instructors.
Appropriation strategy
|
A
|
B
|
C
|
D
|
E
|
F
|
Verbatim translation
|
90%
|
–
|
–
|
50%
|
80%
|
5%
|
Replacing/adding content
|
10%
|
–
|
–
|
20%
|
40%
|
55%
|
Replacing tools
|
–
|
–
|
–
|
50 %
|
40%
|
20%
|
Changing instructions
|
–
|
–
|
20%
|
10%
|
–
|
60%
|
I used pilot tasks as inspiration for my own tasks
|
100%
|
|
100%
|
60%
|
40%
|
80%
|
Changing course structure
|
|
100%
|
5%
|
30%
|
–
|
20%
|
32As regards the use of linguistic strategies, such as translation or subtitling, this was obviously guided by the perceived position of English in the local culture. Translation is considered here in the context of translating content materials such as videos, texts or tutorials, since the instruction itself was always delivered in the local language. Instructors from cultures B/C did not use translation at all, while the instructor representing culture F either created subtitles or had to replace content with equivalents in her local language. Importantly, for partner A, who was aware of low working knowledge of English in his context, the translatability of instructional materials was one of the priorities in selecting them.
33An interesting strategy was linking the training with other locally approved or promoted initiatives and, thus, making the innovation fit national educational standards. For example, instructor A explained:
We tried to promote a currently running initiative from our Ministry of Education, concerning the production and adaptation of OERs and this has proved to be the right decision because the participants were very interested in it (instructor A, questionnaire).
34Also, instructor B appropriated the universal course into her local context by creating partnerships with other minority language-oriented institutions in her region.
35The third research question addressed in the study was the nature of challenges and obstacles encountered by local instructors in the process of pedagogical appropriation. These challenges were extremely diverse, from organisational and motivational (B, C), through technical (A, F) to linguistic ones (A, F), yet even within these categories, significant differences were reported. For example, one of the greatest challenges addressed by partner B was the need to attract participants amidst plentiful, locally available and high-quality professional development courses; most of them additionally subsidised. As previously mentioned, this motivational challenge was addressed by increasing the novelty factor as regards task design, as well as by addressing the positive attitudes to collaboration, which the instructor found typical of her local landscape (see Figure 2). This resulted in a complete redesign of the content and engaging participants in the collective creation of a MOOC for teaching the local minority language.
36Organisation problems of a different nature were an issue for partner C. Since their country is geographically extensive and technologically well-developed, the online component proved to be more easily accessible to training participants than in-situ sessions. The instructors' awareness of this challenge resulted in changing the ratio between face-to-face and online components in favour of the latter. Following this, the instructors used online communication channels such as dedicated Facebook communities to advertise their courses and recruit participants. The choice of recruitment medium enabled participants' digital competence to be assessed–which was the instructors' intention. Both strategies proved very productive and attracted a motivated and goal-oriented group of teacher participants.
37Frequently, reported challenges were also of a technical nature, either in the sense of participants' reported low technical competence (partners A, E and F), or technical difficulties experienced during the in-situ sessions (partners A and E). These challenges were not detrimental to course delivery and seemed to emerge as a natural result of the instruction being technology-supported.
Table 2–Overview of locally appropriated teacher-training courses–as reported by local instructors.
Local context
|
The main challenges reported
|
Dominant adaptation strategies
|
Dominant F2F techniques
|
Culture A
|
Addressing mixed technical abilities of participants.
Technical problems (online access)
Linguistic adaptation of content
|
Translation;
Repurposing tasks from online to F2F;
|
Hands-on computer work;
Pair and group work
Group discussions
Presentations by experts
|
Culture B
|
Teacher attitudes– attracting participants to a professional development course when plentiful, high quality educational content is available.
Content customisation
|
Restructuring
(100%).
Switch to collaborative learning
|
Pair and group work;
Group discussions
|
Culture C
|
Recruitment for F2F meetings. The online mode was predominantly used
|
Task redesign–using original tasks as inspiration.
|
Slide presentations
Group discussions
Presentations by experts
|
Culture D
|
Recruitment (work overload),
Content customisation
|
Translation
Technical appropriation–choosing user-friendly technologies
|
Hands-on computer work activity;
Lectures
|
Culture E
|
Differentiating instruction to address participants' varying technical competence.
|
Content redesign–adding tasks to accommodate teachers4 preferences for quizzes and low-tech activities.
|
Hands-on computer work
Group discussions
Slide presentations
Print hand-outs
|
Culture F
|
Addressing non-English speaking audience and the need for linguistic content customisation;
Technical issues (registration procedures
|
Rebalancing/replacing content in favour of digital training;
Prototype tasks used as inspiration for local ones.
|
Hands-on computer work.
Video watching and pair/group work;
Group discussions
|
38The exploratory study presented here shows that instructional design and its appropriation to local contexts is not free from cultural meanings and, thus, cannot be approached as an automatic procedure. Despite the common tendency to perceive contemporary education as equalised by the common access to the same materials and technologies, cultural uniformity can be a disadvantage for those teachers whose educational cultures may require substantial pedagogical appropriation of instruction. This is particularly true in the area of teacher professional development, in which mainstream good practices tend to be seen as universal and usually delivered top-down. In fact, any successful transfer of innovation to culturally different contexts should be done so with better understanding of the educational cultures of the local recipients. These educational cultures should be accounted for in task appropriation and instruction delivery so that recipients feel assisted in their gradual adaptation of new practices.
39During the appropriation stage investigated in this study, all the local instructors worked in fact as course re-designers, demonstrating high awareness of the unique qualities of their local educational cultures and applying various appropriation strategies to accommodate them. In many contexts, the purpose behind the selected strategies was to make amends for assumed limitations of the local educational contexts, such as limited knowledge of English, low technical competence or low popularity of collaborative tasks. At the same time though, the instructors' awareness of educational preferences of training recipients helped them increase motivation, ensure participation and provide learners with materials relevant to their local linguistic contexts.
40Obviously, the differences between local educational cultures may represent a wide spectrum and the results highlighted here do not capture the entire diversity of educational characteristics typical of a particular culture. However, the findings can serve as a reminder of how culture-specific national and regional educational cultures can be and how they can create unique instructional conditions. As we argue, cultural awareness should prompt greater instructional flexibility and lead to the creation of culturally adaptive materials. Large-scale open content, designed for culturally diverse appropriation, should provide learning tasks, technologies and instructional support that allow for choice, flexibility and multiple perspectives; while still offering a scaffolded and clearly structured generic learning environment. More specifically, this can be achieved if the instructional content to be appropriated provides 1) a choice of tasks representing various pedagogical approaches; 2) a selection of materials which lend themselves to various forms of linguistic appropriation (eg translation, subtitling and cultural replacement); 3) a choice of technological tools for task completion; 4) clear information to future adaptors as to which elements of the instruction can be manipulated with no harm done to the targeted learning objectives. Last but not least, successful appropriation requires instructors' sensitivity to and awareness of the target educational culture to create conditions in which new instructional methods will not be perceived by the trainees as totally alien and, thus, will be readily absorbed. This type of culturally sensitive appropriation may help teachers to embrace new practices and integrate them into their daily routines in the best possible manner.