MOOC Course Contents

If you have visited the course before, you know that it offers a “learning step” design, easy to incorporate into your class lessons. The 15 or so steps included in each week usually take learners about 4 hours to complete. But we encourage students to spend more time to read the many comments posted and make their own, enriching social learning on each step. 

Each week’s content begins with several introductory steps, awareness-awakening videos or articles on IC constructs, learning activities, relevant case studies, questions for response and reflection, and weekly review steps. The five topics included in this IC course include:

We introduce the course topic via definitions, metaphors, explanatory articles, an applied case and invite participants to reflect on possible sources of culture differences. 

We provide ways to get to know others by focusing on cultural identity and begin to adjust our perceptions of and communications with each other. 

We introduce taxonomies that describe how ways of interaction vary across cultures, helping you notice differences in how social contexts, personality, space, and time might be perceived. 

We explore how values often underlie deeper cultural differences, examine ways to contrast variations of values, and consider how they help us analyze cross-cultural misunderstandings. 

We show how adaptation processes underlie all culture learning and interaction, and how engaging in the culture shock, stress, and adjustment process helps develop intercultural competence.