On the Myth of a General National Culture. Making Visible Specific Cultural Characteristics of Learners in Different Educational Contexts

The concept of a few values that can characteristically explain all units of culture (Schneider, 1968, pp.1-2) within any national context generally sounds promising. In order to take design-oriented decisions on culture-specific research questions, such characteristic values, particularly if already determined for many countries, would allow a massive reduction of effort. However, we were unsure if the contexts of academic and professional education allowed the adoption of such values without loosing the characteristic information, which are crucial for designing context sensitive e-Learning contents. In both educational scenarios we investigated the subcultures ‘faculty’, ‘university’, ‘enterprise’, and ‘nation’. In this paper, we exemplarily discuss our study’s results regarding one selected topic
from our questionnaire, i.e. the ‘role of the lecturer’. Actually, we found major differences between the investigated scenarios. Thus, we came to the conclusion
that in our context, adapting, e. g. Hofstede’s national values, would not lead to a learning design that takes the context-specific cultural differences into consideration.