Torras, E & Bellot, A. (2016). The Intercultural Approach to the Online Teaching and Learning at Digital Business Management, 28th IBIMA Conference, Seville, Spain, 9-10 November 2016.

1.     Introduction

Attention to cultural diversity is a necessity at online higher education in management. The teaching-learning processes are governed by the principles of integration and normalization. In this sense, the institutions and the professors pay attention to identify specific needs.

It is also consider that future managers faced difficulties related to work on environments whose culture is unknown for them. The literature distinguishes two educational approaches to address this issue: multicultural education and intercultural education.

At one hand, multicultural education, deeply rooted in culturalism, is to consider and accept the society as a mosaic of cultures. Multiculturalism is a value and not a difficulty. It emphasized the right to cultural difference arises. Multiculturalism is found from the existence of different cultures in the same geographical and social space. These cultures coexist although the influence between them is limited. Multiculturalism is set as the axiom of a desirable model of society by nature.  At this model the hegemonic culture exerts strong pressure on education so that the educational models that emerge tend to be assimilationist, compensatory and sometimes segregationist. Revisions to the concept of multiculturalism have led to locate it from the perspective of socio-critical theory adopting as responsible for directing the social praxis against injustice towards minority groups.

At the other hand, intercultural education is based on coexistence between people of different cultures is resolved if interpersonal relationships are established. Living together involves exchanging and sharing between people. Intercultural education faces the risk posed by the dominant culture in terms of handling, the reinterpretation of the past and denial of identity references. Intercultural is the adjective that designates the actions of interaction between individuals of different cultures.

The dialogue in the online classroom is essential for learning. The educational experience can be achieved if sustained dialogue remains in the teaching-learning emerging between cognitive presence, social presence and teaching presence. In this sense, the community that interacts building sets meanings often emphasizes the importance of student reflections on their experiences [6]. Unlike traditional thinking, which tends to focus on the analysis of responses and connections to the subject matter immediately course, the community of inquiry takes into account the context of students' knowledge in a particular setting.

The term collaborative learning mediated or collaborative online learning, whose own original expression of the psychology of education is Suported Computer Learning Collaborative, was first used by [11]. Collaborative online learning is based on six principles of teaching and learning effective [12]: the principle of multiplicity, the activation principle, the principle of accommodation and adaptation, the principle of authenticity, the principle of delay inadequate and the principle of joint.

• The principle of multiplicity is referred to learning as complex, dynamic, contextualized and interactive teaching so should promote various strategies, representations and perspectives.

• The activation principle emphasizes the importance of student effort to build a valid, robust and usable knowledge so that the student intent is central to this principle.

• Learning is a process of accommodation and adaptation so that teaching should stimulate student self-assessment.

• The principle of authenticity postulates that learning is sensitive to the perspectives, objectives and context of the own student determine the nature and usability of learning. According to the principle of authenticity, teaching is necessary to enable the student to face different types of activity that have value in practice.

• The principle of delay of failure is always the possibility that learning occurs despite the weaknesses of the teaching-learning process.

• Finally, the principle of joint is based on abstraction and commitment by the student, which involves learning so that teaching must give students opportunities to articulate the new knowledge with the previous one.

Bennett [20] postulated a framework for conceptualizing dimensions of intercultural competence in its development model of intercultural sensitivity (DMIS). The DMIS constitutes a progression of worldview with orientations toward cultural difference that understand the potential of increasingly more complete experiences cross-culturally. Three ethnocentric orientations, where culture is a central experience in reality (denial, defense, minimization) and three etnorelatives orientations, where culture is considered an experience (acceptance, adaptation and integration). The aim is to analyze teachers discourse and students discourse attending the dimensions of intercultural sensibility  in relation with collaborative learning.

2.       Aim

The aim is to analyze teachers discourse and students discourse attending the dimensions of intercultural sensibility  in relation with collaborative learning.

3.       Methodology

The data collected to analyze collaborative learning and discourse ethics of care have been electronic written communications and documents produced by the number of students and teachers involved in three activities, which has led to analyze more than 800 e-mails and 42 documents. The unit of analysis is the fragment. The fragmentation of the text was developed following the criteria of Bakhtin (1982): Similar fragments in style, method, manner and the relationship between them.

4.       Results

. The table shown below presents detailed observation categories categories collaborative learning and ethics of care (see table 1).

The data collected to analyze collaborative learning and discourse ethics of care have been electronic written communications and documents produced by the number of students and teachers involved in three activities, which has led to analyze more than 800 e-mails and 42 documents. The unit of analysis is the fragment. The fragmentation of the text was developed following the criteria of Bakhtin (1982): Similar fragments in style, method, manner and the relationship between them.

 . The table shown below presents detailed observation categories categories collaborative learning and ethics of care.

The analysis showed that the teaching and learning of participants in group 1 contained a greater number of fragments of collaborative learning (196 fragments) versus frequency of fragments of the teaching-learning of the participants in group 2 (70 fragments). This result was obtained using a non-parametric Wilcoxon test W-Mann-Whitney test (p = 0.07). That is, 73% of the fragments of speech were categorized as own collaborative learning in group 1 versus group 2 whose percentage of fragments of collaborative discourse on the total is 33%. Likewise, the percentage of fragments of collaborative learning on the total of fragments of speech was much higher in the teaching of group 1 (80% of all text fragments) compared with teachers in group 2 (10% of total fragments of the text). Therefore, in the group that had an own speech teacher collaborative learning it was observed more collaborative presence of speech in students.

Conclusions

Placing ourselves in the field of management, analysis of the teaching-learning students and teachers has shown the increased presence of discourse intercultural at collaborative activities. The co-occurrence of collaborative discourse and intercultural discourse, is relevant since collaborative learning is a teaching methodology based on the belief that learning is enhanced when students develop skills cooperatives to learn and solve problems and tasks in they are immersed. Therefore, analyzing the speech of collaborative learning and find that this speech is more present when a intercultural aspects also appears is a result that should give pause to teachers. In both groups analyzed, collaborative learning speech is present in the teacher and students when the frequency of categories of intercultural is higher. Specifically, the group 1 has a percentage of collaborative and intercultural utmost care group 2 being the teacher group 1 the participant with the highest percentage of intercultural fragments and collaborative learning verbalized.

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