Online Learning Style Preferences: An Analysis on Taiwanese and USA Learners

With the growing advances in telecommunication techniques, many countries have adopted e-learning into school education and life-long learning. College institutions in Taiwan and many other countries have followed such trend by establishing a wide variety of distance learning course offerings. In these new multicultural teaching and learning environments, learning styles surface as an important variable to take into consideration. This paper reports on the development of an online learning style preferences inventory and the analyses of data collected in two countries, Taiwan and USA. A 64-item online learning styles inventory was distributed to Taiwanese and American students respectively, 368 and 371 valid sets of data were collected and analyzed, and the results showed differing patterns on the online learning style preferences of the sample. The results of this exploratory study will be helpful in at least two ways. First, educators in different countries can use our findings to hypothesize and further investigate their students' overall online learning style preferences. Second, the results can potentially serve as a basis for the design and implementation of cross-cultural telecommunication exchanges, many of which have been launched for second/foreign language and cross-cultural learning in the past few years.