ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we discuss some linguistic and cultural issues in the teaching and assessment of students who are distributed globally across place and time and who are thereby located in diverse local contexts; who are likely to bring different expectations and understandings to their learning; and who are, to a large extent, unknown, and perhaps unknowable, to course designers. Drawing mainly on our experiences as designers and producers of supported open learning materials at the Open University (UK), as well as related research on language and global communication, we focus on the problems and possibilities of using English, a ‘global’ language, as a medium for the design of teaching and assessment materials. For the purposes of this chapter, we are less concerned with issues related to local tuition and assessment, although we do make some reference to this. Although our teaching situation is the particular one of an English-medium institution delivering its courses to locations across the globe, we hope our experiences will have broader relevance for anyone working with linguistically or culturally diverse groups and/or in the context of distributed learning. The examples we refer to are generally from traditional print-based courses, but the points we raise will apply to courses using different modes of teaching/course delivery, including new information technologies.
