Is it Important to Study Cultural Differences?

Abstract

This paper discusses the authors’ interest in effects of culture on website design in two cultures and on the evaluation of teaching in three cultures. We obviously thought the influence of culture important enough in these two very different contexts to warrant our consideration and investigation. In the case of website design the intention was to discover any differences that can be attributed to cultural differences in order to inform website design when creating a website variant for a particular country or culture. In the case of evaluation of teaching the intention was to investigate different approaches to evaluation of teaching in order to see whether there are any common themes emerging from the data. There are two slightly different outcomes. Both papers discover that culture does not play as important a role as initially thought. The paper investigating websites found some evidence of a collectivist culture. The paper on the evaluation of teaching on the other hand found the more important effect of institutional goals and objectives when conducting such evaluation than the country where such evaluation is conducted.