A Situation-Aware e-Learning System to Support Intercultural Competence Development

Intercultural competence is a set of cognitive, behavioral, and affective skills that are critical for effective and appropriate communication and collaboration with people of different cultures. To effectively work in multicultural groups, and develop intercultural competence, a student must be aware of his/her cultural values and those of each member of the group, understand the cultural differences and decide the best course of action for communicating and collaborating with others, by achieving and maintaining adequate levels of cultural situation awareness. In this paper, we propose a conceptual architecture of a situation-aware adaptive e-learning system to support the work of multicultural student groups, fostering the development of intercultural competence.