Introduction to Intercultural Studies: Defining the Concept of Culture

The course "Introduction to Intercultural Studies: Defining the Concept of Culture" is a well-designed course in that theories are discussed, useful links are provided, exercises and interactions are engaging, the tests are challenging. The links give us further information to have more comprehensive understanding of culture, interculturality, and related concepts.

The course organization is such that the participants are prepared well with theoretical understanding of the concepts before application tasks are given. For deeper learning and application, research is made a component of the course thatchallenged the participants to extend learning.The engagement of peers in evaluating the research serves to extend knowledge of the topic for two reasons: 1. we get to learn about the culture of other participants and 2. we get to learn how to give considered evaluation with the help of the guidelines provided.

I'm particularly gratified to have taken the course that clarified that people can belong to a wide variety of different cultures and drove home the point that cultural practices are neither good or bad, just different. Philippine culture has been described by a Western writer as a "fractured culture" -- a rather negative description. As a people, we are by accident a product of our colonial past and our colonizers left us with both good and negative contributions to our native culture but I can proudly say that some of our people made good use of the positive ones.

Than you for the positive affirmations that for me clearly defined the concept of culture.

A suggestion is to pair participants from widely different cultures for the evaluation assignment so we maximize our learning from each other.

The objectives for the course were ambitious for such a topic whose parameters are fluid and cannot be pinned down and limited to any simple, concrete boundary. The course and the participant comments certainly made me think more widely and deeply about the issues addressed. For me, it showed that a Future Learn course can be quite academic and still very approachable. Although a "lecture" style was often used for the videos, they were varied with interesting interviews. The assignments were rich, productive and interestingly shared for comment.

I would have liked however, to understand more clearly what happens to the exercise input, once submitted. It could have been very interesting if answers had been summarised in some way as feedback: perhaps by using word cloud technology, even if this looses some of the nuance that is possible when writing discursive replies to the questions.

Plus, I would have liked to take the end of course test, even if without feedback, appreciating that tailored feedback cannot be provided for free.

I found it very refreshing that the course referred to sources in more than just English, too!!! Great intercultural awareness and sensitivity in this respect!

More generally, and especially in Future Learn courses with large numbers of comments, it would be useful if some way of navigating through key threads could be introduced - perhaps by asking for comments to have a searchable theme title, possibly linked to any word cloud?

It could also be productive if selections were made to highlight interesting comments, as is done by some other discussion fora: something to highlight, such as "pick of the week" comments.