Knowledge, Skills and Sustainable Values in Learning Organizations: Some Implications from the Multicultural Virtual Classroom

Abstract

The global diffusion of communication technology imposes major pressures on learning organisations that are exacerbated by the wide range of cultures within which those learning organisations must participate. Business education has responded by adopting/adapting the new communications technologies to the traditional classroom delivery method by pursuing elearning, but the development of communication technology, and the development of elearning techniques have been driven by a small number of dominant cultures. Increasingly, individual elearning participants are coming from cultures other than the dominant cultures – a shift which has major implications for learning organisations, elearners, and edelivered education providers. Using a multicultural environment as a background, this paper addresses the issues of the impact of elearner culture on learning in the virtual environment.