Abstract:

In the era of increasing globalisation, the world communities cannot sidestep the influence of cultural globalisation. Today’s widely perceived globalisation, which is based mostly upon economic aspects, does also bring direct and indirect influences to the nations’ culture giving a new shape to their cultural perception. This study is an effort to discuss how an undergraduate course in world culture offered at Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT) develops the learning and cultural understanding of its students. The course on global culture, however, provides a unique format for students to learn about other cultures without travelling. Together with their peers at UMT, students from two international partner universities, namely East Carolina University and the University of Namibia communicate each other through live video conferencing and interactive chat technology. Partner universities conduct classes during a semester in a way, so each culture is partnered with two other cultures. Students discuss topics ranging from college life, cultural traditions and family, and the meaning of life and religion to stereotypes and prejudices. With data collected through a structured questionnaire distributed to all 12 students, who took the course at UMT in the preceding academic semester, the study specifically evaluates and analyses their learning and perception toward the course, and discusses the implications of empirical results at local, national, and international levels. Upon collecting data using a random sampling technique, descriptive statistics such as frequency, mean, and standard deviation has been calculated for all 22 variables in the original questionnaire. The one sample t-test has then been employed for all the variables to see whether there is any significant difference between the actual and observed responses provided by the students concerning their learning and perception toward the course. However, the empirical results show that this course creates awareness, sense of appreciation and helps students in increasing their understanding and tolerance of global cultural diversity. The study also finds that Malaysian culture offers less freedom compared to USA culture. However, the experiment has shown that undertaking the world culture course does not divert the students from their culture rather it causes a fundamental shift in their views and values of the world culture as a universal sustainable culture.

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