How Cultural Diversity Influences Students’ Online Learning Engagement with Online Technologies—A Narrative Analysis

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic early in 2020, it had versed the learning mode of offline into online teaching and learning in many parts of the world, while students from different cultural backgrounds may have different perceptions and responses toward online learning. Students’ engagement, particularly the emotional dimension is discussed in this study to evaluate different students’ perceptions about online learning to represent how culture impact on students’ online learning by using Bamberg (1997)’s narrative analysis. 48 interviews were held and 2 interviews of their participants from Macau and Mainland China were particularly picked out to represent how students from different cultural backgrounds are going to position themselves in the discourse of online learning engagement with the involvement of online technologies. Through this study, it was found that students from the high-context cultural learning background (Macau) would hold a more positive attitude with online learning activities compared to students from the low-context learning context, position themselves as relaxed online capabilities. While students from a relatively low-context cultural background (Mainland China) eager to pursue high-efficiency of learning, with a negative attitude towards online learning, position themselves as positive efficiency seekers, underestimate the high-ambiguity and low-efficiency of online learning. Hence, after the rough understanding of students’ different perceptions of online learning from different cultural backgrounds, this study further proved the influence of different cultures on learning engagement and provided some implications from different perspectives for pedagogical implementation and instructors to improve online curriculum design.