Exploring cultural challenges to implementing Educational Technology in the higher education sector in India

Educational technology involves the integration of technologies and media in instructional contexts and includes integrating media into instructional processes to enhance the effectiveness of the teaching-learning process. Technology-enhanced learning platforms such as email, instant messaging, asynchronous discussion and synchronous conferencing are highly flexible and convenient, and their use can result in powerful combinations of context, communication and purposeful activity which enhance the learning experience[Rawlins and Kehrwald, 2014]. One of the challenges of an intelligent educational technology platform is the ability to cater to a diverse cohort of students and teachers across different cultures [Pinkwart, 2016]. Culture, referred to as the collective mental programming of the human mind[Hofstede, 2010a], and education, which is the agent of culture, are inter-related [Brameld, 1955]: culture shapes pedagogy, educational policies and infrastructure and conversely, education is a major vehicle by which learners become enculturated[Ansari, 2011]. The influence of culture on shaping educational policies and knowledge-sharing in the context of computer-based virtual classroom has already been highlighted [Zhang et al., 2014].
Electronic learning is still in its infancy in developing countries, where the challenges in implementing electronic learning platforms are different [Bhuasiri et al., 2012]. Culture has been recognised as one of the conceptual challenges for implementing e-learning[Grönlund and Islam, 2010],[Shraim and Khlaif, 2010]. The implementation of educational technologies are influenced by unique cultural preferences in different societies. For example, the importance of including images and symbols appropriate for the local culture has been recognised[Andersson and Grönlund, 2009]. Language and interactive nature contribute to culture and studies have highlighted the importance of usefulness and perceived ease of use while using technology.[Jung, 2015]. For these reasons, transplanting technology-embedded platforms rendered in the setting of Western culture would be inappropriate and possibly irrelevant in a society where cultural pedagogy is different.
The aim of this study therefore is to explore different cultural factors that influence educational technology.
The study is divided into different sections. After the present introduction, section II explains the background to this research. Section III sets out the experimental design and section IV describes the results of this survey. Section V presents the discussion, section VI sets out the conclusions and lastly section VII sets out the acknowledgement.

This section briefly outlines some issues and concepts underpinning this research. The section begins by describing the (non)preference of technology in teaching, followed by a review of fundamental challenges related to the use of electronic learning, and finally challenges the effects of educational culture in adopting technology posed by a culture which values face-to-face presence of an instructor.

Traditional‘chalk and talk’teaching techniques is considered in many professions to be superior for different reasons. 40.5% of teachers prefer the traditional lecture delivery using chalkboard [Boulos et al., 2007]whereas some researchers argue that greater academic returns can be attained when instructors integrate technology such as mobile-learning, laptops and tablets [Castillo-Manzano et al., 2017]. However, the rise of different technologies such as MOOC with open licensing, web based virtual learning environments, teleconferencing and more than 321 free educational technologies (elearningindustry.com) have made distance education readily accessible. The perceived ease of use and environmental context have been identified as determinants of e-learning adoption in universities whereas complex organisational compatibility can contribute to e-learning neglect [Ansong et al., 2017]. Institutionalising e-learning depends on student's use of computers and related technologies and hence e-learning tools should be made more attractive to be adopted by students [Boateng et al., 2016].
[Andersson and Grönlund, 2009] demonstrated that there are several challenges faced by institutions in developing countries when integrating technology into learning platforms. The need for quality assurance model for e-learning systems, absence of e-learning resources, lack of implementation process and the lack of instructional design have been identified as critical issues in localised environment[Farid et al., 2015]. Similarly, barriers such as electricity failure, supply[Oye et al., 2011] and English proficiency were identified as most significant prevailing issues in Pakistani private Higher Education(HE) institutions[Qureshi et al., 2012]. [Kamba, 2009] explored barriers faced by staff and students in Nigerian universities and observed that internet related e-learning was used for finding information relating to research, web pages for advertisement of universities, transaction of students rather than actual online learning. Importantly, the study[Oye et al., 2011] highlighted the problem of a narrow bandwidth impeding with the adoption of electronic learning. Likewise, barriers such as price, rural access and ICT literacy have been identified in SriLanka[Gunawardana, 2005]. Gunga and Ricketts[Gunga and Ricketts, 2007] have identified that collaboration networks that include e-learning sponsors, policy makers, telecommunication network service providers and educators are required to solve problems around online education in Africa. Organisational challenges such as teacher training and social challenges including educational culture focused on repetition[Grönlund and Islam, 2010]are additional challenges.
Even though ICT is considered as a facilitator of knowledge creation in leading economies(OECD, 1996),mindset[Tripathi and Jeevan, 2010] of stakeholders-students, administrators, teachers- have been identified as a barrier towards a flexible mode of teaching facilitated by e-learning. In fact, research demonstrates that technostress can be better acknowledged if the link between personality and culture along with technostress creators were understood[Krishnan, 2017]. Similarly, [Zhang et al., 2014] have shown that cultural values(collectivism, concern for face) impact the nature of HE student's knowledge sharing motivations. Importantly, factors such as culture and gender differences have been highlighted in Chinese-US higher educational sector when using technology and suggest that diversity within cultural groups among sub-cultures should be considered in understanding children's IT use[Jackson et al., 2008]. Likewise, differences in culture were recognised in a Chinese-German study in which it was observed that the Chinese cohort preferred implicit communication styles from robots to accept recommendations compared to the German cohort[Rau et al., 2009]. The factors influencing primary school teachers’ acceptance of educational technology in China include facilitating conditions and attitude as the most significant[Wong, 2016]. These studies suggest that learning using technologies differ from country to country and depends on a number of factors that are unique to each situation- a proposition which this current study tries to elaborate.
Even though cultural challenges have been identified in e-learning in the past, none of the studies have explored the cultural effects in educational technologies. The detailed classification methodology framework[Hersh, 2017] identifies culture as one of the factors in personal characteristics in the ICT-based learning technologies for disabled people however, this has been poorly explored. To address this gap, this study aims to understand the effects of culture in educational technologies and suggest a culturally inclusive framework for a cohort of faculty members in higher education institutions across India.

To evaluate the challenges faced by lecturers in the HE sector in India, the author carried out a cross-sectional study to evaluate the challenges of e-learning, cultural factors affecting educational technology and intrinsic motivation of lecturers to complete self-development and learning tasks. A questionnaire was designed covering demographic characteristics (gender, age, state , country of birth, area where brought up(town or village or city), highest education level(graduation, post graduation or PhD), current institution type(private-aided, private-unaided or government), department, years of teaching experience, years of teaching in the current institution and country of parent's birth and their jobs) [Penelo et al., 2011]. Cultural measures described by Hofstede (Power Distance(PD), Individualist/Collectivist(I/C), Masculine/Feminine(M/F) and Uncertainty Avoidance(UA) [Hofstede, 2010b] and measures of intrinsic motivation, in the grit scale (Passion(PA) and Perseverance(PE)) [Duckworth et al., 2007] were included. Lastly, open questions probing participants'views about technology were included. The questionnaire was administered to 3 participants and was amended based on their feedback. These questionnaires were not included in the analysis.The final questionnaire consisted of 66 items distributed over 5 domains (key questions provided in appendix). The responses to questions were measured using either using Likert ( 5-point between 1- strongly agree /important/comfortable/likely/friendly and 5-strongly disagree /unimportant/uncomfortable/unlikely/unfriendly) or dichotomous scaling (agree/disagree). The responses to questions for grit were measured using Likert scaling (5-points between 1-Not at all like me and 5-very much like me). The survey was administered through telephone, paper or electronically during the Spring and Autumn semesters of 2018 between March and September. Thrity-three institutions were randomly selected from Google’s higher educational institutions in India and teaching staff were contacted through email by using addresses available on the respective universities’ website. Participants who were using educational technology were invited to participate after providing informed consent and they returned the completed questionnaires through email. Those contacted through telephone were taken through the structured questionnaire and responses were entered. Figure 1 depicts the inclusion of participants. Data were treated with strict confidentiality and anonymity.

Most of the participants of the survey were from private-unaided institutions. The cohort studied was experienced in teaching(mean teaching experience 11 years) and they had tried different teaching methods including some degree of electronic learning. Indeed all respondents used electronic resources for preparing for lessons however only half of the cohort used the internet during the lesson. The types of resources used from the internet were most commonly PDFs and e-books. Slightly more than half of institutions had invested in developing their learning platforms.
It seems that the challenges faced by staff are many.

The results of this study highlights several challenges faced by staff in the HE sector across India to implementing education technologies. These include the lack of dedicated time set aside for maintaining e-learning systems up-to-date, cultural factors and lack of passion. When evaluating the cultural measure of Individualistic/Collective(I/C), this cohort exhibited a mix of responses supporting both individual and collective natures; however the results suggest that the lecturers preferred a collective culture of looking after the group's interest rather than the individual 's interests. This collective culture is an element to be taken into consideration when implementing technology frameworks.The Power Distance (PD)measure represents the inequality in society and evaluating the emotional distance that separates subordinates from their bosses, this study indicated markers that were suggestive of cultures with greater Power Distances. A hierarchal model between teacher and student is still strongly embedded in Indian culture and educational technology should incorporate this to be successfully implemented. The Masculine/Feminine(M/F) measure which reflects the emotional gender roles in the mental programming in societies, and it was found that the responses were mainly masculine. Lastly, evaluating the culture measure of Uncertainty Avoidance(UA), which is the extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations, the result suggest that HE staff prefer a culture where there is less ambiguity and uncertainty. Any educational technology to be implemented in such cultures should be aware of this and avoid uncertainties where possible. The lecturers in this cohort were very gritted professionals who had greater perseverance than passion, which suggests that with the culturally appropriate frame work the cohort are intrinsically motivated to complete challenging tasks.

This study sought to explore a culturally adaptive learning environment which is appropriate to the requirements of educational technology, and the result that reflected positive use of technology among lecturers in terms of lesson preparation and delivery and also gave different cultural and motivational indications about the role of an educational technology that is culturally adaptive.
Our study has shown that cultural challenges are significant and educational environments are affected by the cultural influences in the context of historical background of a country. Users in a culture which are different from western culture require a learning technology that integrates with their culture. A culturally appropriate learning platform will contribute to the creation of a workforce relevant to that particular society and would be an effective way to converge the motives of government, businesses and local employment.

The author acknowledges Dr. James Ohene-Djan, Goldsmiths, University of London for input received during the design of the study.