TEACHING INTERCULTURALISM BY RESORT TO GAMIFICATION AND E-LEARNING

This paper explores the extent to which the teaching of interculturalism in a higher education environment may become more effective by resort to gamification and e-learning. To highlight the benefits of these, if any, we used two separate series of third-year students who attended the same course, while introducing the e-learning game elements to only one (Series 2), and then examined, at the end of the semester, the academic achievement of those who were exposed to the e-learning gamification activity in comparison with those who were not. This activity relied on Geert Hofstede and Michael Minkov’s intercultural key concepts used in the profiling and classification of cultures, organized in six pairs concerning: individualism-collectivism, high-low power distance, high-low uncertainty avoidance, long-short term orientation, masculinity-femininity and indulgence-restraint. The task for the students consisted in the content authoring of realistic situations put into filmed short scenarios, which needed to highlight the problems and differences arising when people coming from dissimilar cultures, with various mindsets active as basic assumptions, meet and clash. Since there were six pairs of intercultural concepts, each of the two groups of students into which we divided the course participants from Series 2 received three, and had to make three videos, one for each set. The videos were made exclusively by them, transformed into actors-characters. The resources used for this assignment had to include, primarily, various electronic devices, along with other items such as clothing, shooting site, props etc. Besides the conception and making of the videos, the game further consisted in presenting them to the other group, who had to guess the theoretical concepts illustrated in each. In other words, the videos further became an e-learning tool for the students-viewers – a status that all the students involved in the task got to hold, in turns, being both creators and beneficiaries of an e-learning instrument with gamification elements. Academic performance, visible in the course test, was much better in the case of the students involved in the e-learning gamification task which helped both its authors and its spectators understand and remember the interculturalism notions better. The extended conclusion of the paper bears on the way in which this type of assignment helps the development of additional skills and desirable behaviors as well: computer and electronics-handling literacy, organizational and team work abilities, creativity and imagination, empathy and flexible perspective, work responsibility, self-esteem etc.