Teaching and Training for Global Engineering

Perspectives on Culture and Professional Communication Practices

Kirk St. Amant, Madelyn Flammia

• Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781118328026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119084280
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Provides a foundation for understanding a range of linguistic, cultural, and technological factors to effectively practice international communication in a variety of professional communication arenas

• An in-depth analysis of how cultural factors influence translation, document design, and visual communication
• A review of approaches for addressing the issue of international communication in a range of classes and training sessions 
• A summary of strategies for engaging in effective e-learning in international contexts
• A synopsis of how to incorporate emerging media into international teaching and training practices

III
Online Contexts

CHAPTER 6
Autonomous Learning and New Possibilities for Intercultural Communication in Online Higher Education in Mexico

César Correa Arias

University of Guadalajara

Education is a heterogeneous worldwide system that is in constant transformation due to continuous social, economical and technical changes and challenges. Such factors continually confront contemporary societies when they try to figure out what could be the role of technologies in transforming educational processes. For nearly three decades, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been changing the way teachers and scholars experience didactics and curriculum processes inside institutions of higher education. However, at the moment of integrating ICTs in the curriculum, as an institutional policy, there could be significant fissures between curricular and didactic purposes, applied methodologies and educational practices. It is the coherence between curriculum and didactic development that could give ICTs, as mediation, an important pedagogical role within the processes of learning and teaching. This chapter examines the role of autonomous learning among students and teachers mediated by ICTs in building meaningful curricular experiences, and creating bridges between curricular and didactic development, reflective thinking and learning practices. In undertaking such analysis, the author draws on experiences from online courses that are part of distinct degree programs at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico.

6.1 Introduction

In the last three decades, diverse transformations in education have been challenging the nature of universities as we have known them. Among the most important factors affecting this situation are

• An unplanned expansion of student enrollment
• A systematical and deterministic institutional evaluation
• An increase in financial difficulties among educational institutions and difficult labor conditions of scholars
• A growing involvement of policy-makers and public decision-makers in the operations of universities
• Contradictions between quality of education and social equity across educational programs

Additionally, the increasing use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in higher education has designed substantial modifications in how students are learning, how teachers are organizing different educational activities, and how both groups are experiencing the vast possibilities of virtual education. The potential force of ICTs can, however, amplify or diminish the use of a significant pedagogy. It can also decrease valuable participant social interaction depending on how ICTs are used to share information with and foster communication with students (e.g., student-to-student or student-to-instructor exchanges).

In many ways, these factors make the crisis of the contemporary university a part of a larger crisis of civilization [1] that involves all sectors of human activities. Such situations, moreover, are often seen as an extension of how the development of ICTs is transforming the functions, meanings and goals of universities worldwide. Understanding such factors requires educators, administrators, and students to rethink the substantive improvement of educational processes within the modern university. These changes affect the following processes among others:

• Curricular and didactics development
• Communication processes among teachers and students
• Institutional behavior regarding teachers' profiles and students' and teachers' performance (evaluation processes)
• Students' educational and professional competencies required for global job markets

Interestingly, the inclusion of ICTs within universities can be relatively seamless for pedagogical purposes if the integration of these technologies reproduces traditional face-to-face educational models. In fact, a participative and conscious pedagogical approach to ICTs can result in the creation of a flexible curriculum that can lead to wider student and teacher participation in online settings. Within this context, the instructional approach of autonomous learning can help educators maximize the benefits of using ICTs in educational environments, particularly in global educational contexts. Moreover, autonomous learning can help students not only to improve learning conditions but also to develop responsible practices as students and future participants in the global job markets.

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Educators and students using autonomous learning, based in curricular experiences, can improve pedagogical and communicational interactions for a meaningful construction of knowledge in higher education, particularly when such experiences are extended into global contexts.

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This chapter examines how the strategic and pedagogical use of ICTs can better improve the curriculum and didactics development among teachers and students. The central thesis of the chapter affirms that educators and students using autonomous learning, based on curricular experiences, can improve pedagogical and communicational interactions for a meaningful construction of knowledge in higher education, particularly when such experiences are extended into intercultural global contexts (e.g., students located in different nations using ICTs to participate in the same online class).

To this end, the chapter offers a critical analysis of how autonomous learning can transform the use of ICTs and facilitate the development of more complex, diverse, inclusive and wider learning and teaching environments.

6.2 The Nature and Characteristics of Autonomous Learning

In general, knowledge allows social mobility, reaffirms identity and facilitates communicational interaction within human communities.

Knowledge compels decisions and creates new contexts of action. Individuals are liberated from structures and they must redefine their situation of action under conditions of manufactured insecurity in forms and strategies of reflected modernization. [2, p. 25]

In this sense, knowledge is not simply a value or a currency within globalized markets, as many actual trends consider it to be [3, 4, 5]. Rather, it becomes a structural component of individuals' lives and the base of the process of human socialization. Communicational interactions, in turn, are the main vehicle through which knowledge can be created, modified, and shared with the members of a given group. And as online education can increase both the size and the scope of the group, it can foster new kinds of knowledge creation and dissemination.

The nature of learning, however, depends on the particular culture in which knowledge is designed and distributed. Learning is also connected to the practical actions of agents (i.e., the individuals who communicate/create and share knowledge) who belong to that culture. Consequently, online classrooms that bring together a wide swath of students and teachers from a range of cultures provide participants with unique and important knowledge creation and knowledge sharing experiences.

The more different the cultural groups interacting in such contexts are, the richer the kind and the scope of the knowledge that can emerge from such settings. Within such situations, the autonomy of learning emerges as a relevant alternative to link knowledge to social actions.

6.2.1 Historical Development of Autonomous Learning

Over the last 40 years, autonomous learning has evolved from schematic, behavioral, and cognitive models of learning to become a central component of a constructivist pedagogical model that focuses on the nature and quality of curricular experiences. Autonomous learning's first phase of development started in the 1970s and lasted until the early 1990s. The initial phase focused largely on the development of basic and complex cognitive skills (e.g., perception, description, induction, deduction, abduction and memory) as the construction of an object of study [6, 7]. This approach also relegated social and communicative interactions (e.g., effective communication, expert dialogue, and capacity to discuss and respect others' ideas, negotiation abilities) to a secondary or a background position.

Consequently, this cognitive approach relates curricular design and educational development to individuals' mental skills performance without taking into account the social interactions and processes of communication that made possible such performance. Although this approach opened spaces for curriculum development of an apparently deeper complexity, it also designed a considerable gap between didactics and curriculum that still exists in worldwide educational practices today.

It was only at the end of the 1990s that autonomous learning took on the role of an agent of engaged interaction and participation in more complex learning and communicational environments. What was particularly important about this shift is the fact that autonomous learning integrated a social constructivism approach. Further, with the new approach, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• IEEE Press
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• A Note from the Series Editor
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• SECTION I DESIGN CONTEXTS
• SECTION II SOCIETAL CONTEXTS
• SECTION III ONLINE CONTEXTS
• SECTION IV EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS
• Biographies
• Index
• IEEE PCS PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING COMMUNICATION SERIES
• EULA