Week 8 Reflection

I didn’t have a professional work before and now. So, I mainly use my own experience, as an international student, to explore useful application that description in this chapter.

Cross-Cultural Training

In my undergraduate and graduate study, I play different roles. In my undergraduate period, I studied in a University that has 60% students coming from different countries. I once helped many international students to learn Chinese. At that time, my English was not good. In that way, communicating was a hard thing sometimes. Like sometimes they didn’t understand what you were talking about since they couldn’t understand the idiom or slang, or maybe they didn’t know some particular things that only had in China. I realized the cultural gap at that time. And now in my graduate study, I reverse my role to be an international student. In here, I’m the one who have a different culture with most of my classmate, and the one who have to always ask, “Oh, what is that?” I need to learn the new culture and adjust myself to the new educational system while I study the EDT knowledge. Therefore, using my own experience to say, it is important to consider the cultural factor in instruction.

Technology-based training delivery

Here I want to address the Web-based training most. I never experience a normal web class in University before. In China, I rarely hear about any University have a web class (maybe now some Universities have but I don’t know). The best thing I get in web class, comparing Chinese class and US web class is the feedback. Well, this maybe a plaint. In my four years undergraduate, I never got a feedback from all my teachers, except the graduation thesis. Many Chinese students might face this problem. Since there are too many people in China, every class might have 40 or more, sometime even 70, students. And for some public class, there might have more than 200 students in one class room. In that way, most teachers haven’t time to give feedback to every student. So most of the time, they just give us a grade. But without a feedback, student will not know which part they didn’t do well that cause they lose the point. As a consequence, they did practice but they did get improvement. But the web class is different. Its features of synchronous and asynchronous allow teachers have more time on their student so that student can also benefit from self-study and teacher’s help.