"An Investigation into the Relationship Between Low-Context Online Learning and
High-Context Learners"
By Timothy Paul Westbrook
Paper presentation for NAPCE/SPCE 2013- Chicago

Farmer (2010, 472) writes, “The anonymity of online communication can … make females from male-dominated cultures feel more comfortable voicing their opinions.”

Ibarra (2000, 7) reports, “No one can hear my accent on the keyboard!” According to Al-Harthi (2005, 7), students from Arab Gulf states felt a sense of anonymity online and both male and female felt “freer to speak their minds.” As an online instructor myself in a predominantly white Christian university, I have often pondered how culture might interact with online forms of education and whether my own institution is serving at full capacity.

Students who come from a high context culture may find the low-context, online culture to lack cues that they would normally expect when meeting face-to-face

Judging that online communication by definition is low context (Lustig and Koester 2006, 111), this study explores the impact low-context communication makes in the learning environment of students from high-context cultures by summarizing Hall’s definitions of contexting

Ever since Hall (1976, 91–101) distinguished between high- and low context cultures, researchers have been studying their implications for cross-cultural communication. According to Hall, high-context communication takes place non-verbally with cues expressed between people or through places and events. The closer one is to a given culture, the more communication she or he can detect from the context. In contrast, low-context communication occurs explicitly, encoded in words spoken or written. Nonverbal or contextual cues are either ignored or left unobserved. Hall sees “contexting” as a major force that can lead to clashes of people from disparate