Many university students in Hawaii planning to study abroad in Japan will experience some form of cultural miscommunication and misunderstanding. These experiences can make it difficult for students to join authentic Japanese communities during their time abroad. To help solve this issue, this project designed and evaluated online asynchronous instruction about common Japanese cultural practices. The instruction combined multimedia with various interactive activities to help students 1) be more aware of the cultural differences between their home culture and Japanese culture and 2) make adjustments so they can participate in the Japanese community more easily.
The instruction used Bloom’s Taxonomy to break down and sequence the content, as well as Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction and Keller’s ARCS model to ensure the lessons targeted the cognitive and affective domains.
To evaluate the instruction, synchronous usability testing and asynchronous learning effectiveness testing were conducted with 16 Japanese language learning students (n = 16). The usability test helped capture diverse perspectives on the design of the instruction and was valuable in revising its navigation. In general, participants felt the instructional lessons were meaningful and enjoyable. Future work will be needed to research more about the target audience and to include more content covering additional cultural practices.
Moe Kitamura