Student multicultural awareness in online community college classes

Abstract

Purpose

US community colleges are based on an open‐door mission and serve to provide access to students of diverse backgrounds. Online learning is one of the fastest growing segments of community college offerings – serving both local and geographical dispersed students. If the community college system embraces its open‐door mission, it must embrace new ways of providing multicultural experiences within online classes. The purpose of this paper is to understand if multiculturalism plays a significant role for students in the traditional face‐to‐face college classroom – what role, if any, does it play for student learning in online classrooms? Literature on multicultural education, distance learning, and social psychology are explored within the context of community colleges.

Design/methodology/approach

Using a one‐group pretest‐posttest design, a multicultural awareness survey was administered twice over the course of an academic quarter to determine if online faculty that teach with multicultural perspectives effected any substantive change in student awareness with multiculturalism.

Findings

The results indicate statistically significant shifts in how societal issues of multiculturalism are perceived by the student. However, the null hypothesis could not be rejected in how students perceived any changes to their own cultural self‐knowledge.

Practical implications

This paper shares how online content might effect change in online students' experiences with multiculturalism. Thus, faculty can use these results to determine how to develop curriculum to meet multicultural course objectives.

Originality/value

Little research has been conducted analyzing connections between online learning and measurable student multicultural learning gains.

Citation

Brown, W.J. (2010), "Student multicultural awareness in online community college classes", Multicultural Education & Technology Journal, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 99-112. https://doi.org/10.1108/17504971011052313