The role of technology in internationalising the language of education

There is no doubt that English is the most international language used for both formal and informal communication purposes across the globe. For instance, the common language used by businesses, governments and travellers from different linguistic backgrounds is English. This popularity and general acceptance has placed the English-speaking countries in an advantageous position in terms of attracting students from different parts of the globe. This trend is evidenced by the numbers of international enrolments and partnerships between international and English-speaking universities, in particular, for Business related courses. English language programs have been specially designed for the purpose of preparing international students for tertiary education at English-speaking universities. Although these programs have been successful, the fact is that the linguistic skills and abilities of many international students do not always match those of the local English-speaking students. Hence, additional methods of overcoming this problem should also be taken into consideration. An effective approach would be to design courses and teaching materials in such a way that learning reliance on language is minimised. This paper investigates how the latest technologies can be used in creating learning environments with a lower text dependency to suit students from different linguistic backgrounds. In order to determine the learning effectiveness of less language-dependent teaching materials, a visually rich multimedia system on Project Management was used as an instrument. This multimedia system was developed by the author and his colleagues at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia. A group of 34 undergraduate students in Operations Management from a Mexican tertiary institute were chosen for this particular study. Spanish was the native language of all of these students. After giving them a seminar on introductory project management via the multimedia system, they were interviewed. The comments and feedback provided by these students have demonstrated that visual features in educational multimedia can remove the dependency on text for understanding the concepts. Hence, it would possible to develop educational multimedia in a generic language such as English and then make it available for students from different parts of the world.