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Advances in Information Systems Development pp 169–185Cite as

Social Position and Gender Perspectives of eLearning Systems: A Study of Social Sustainability

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation ((LNISO,volume 34))

Abstract

The use of information and communication technologies has an increasing impact on our everyday life. The large impact of software engineering on society also means that sociocultural factors are becoming crucial for software systems. Gender and cultural diversity have a significant effect on software development, the sustainability of the software and on the society where the software is used. Thus, these diversity aspects should be analysed while developing a software system. This chapter presents an empirical study that investigates the social position of learner and instructor, gender and cultural differences in needs and use of system features. Our focus is on eLearning systems used in Australia and Saudi Arabia. The results of the study might also be expanded to other application domains such as eHealth and eGovernment. To explore the differences, we applied a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to data collected from 174 participants. The results demonstrated that social position, gender and cultural diversity have significant impacts on users’ needs and preferences.

A prior version of this paper has been published in the ISD2018 Proceedings (http://aisel.aisnet.org/isd2014/proceedings2018)

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all Saudi Arabia and Australian participants for taking part in our research. Also, we acknowledge that Alharthi and Alsanoosy are supported by scholarships from Umm Al-Qura and Taiba Universities, Saudi Arabia, respectively.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

    Ahmed D. Alharthi, Tawfeeq Alsanoosy, Maria Spichkova & Margaret Hamilton

Authors
  1. Ahmed D. Alharthi
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  2. Tawfeeq Alsanoosy
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  3. Maria Spichkova
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  4. Margaret Hamilton
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ahmed D. Alharthi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Bo Andersson

  2. School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Björn Johansson

  3. Cairnes School of Business and Economics, National University of Ireland Galway, Galway, Ireland

    Chris Barry

  4. Cairnes School of Business and Economics, National University of Ireland Galway, Galway, Ireland

    Michael Lang

  5. Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Henry Linger

  6. Information Systems Department, IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain

    Christoph Schneider

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Alharthi, A.D., Alsanoosy, T., Spichkova, M., Hamilton, M. (2019). Social Position and Gender Perspectives of eLearning Systems: A Study of Social Sustainability. In: Andersson, B., Johansson, B., Barry, C., Lang, M., Linger, H., Schneider, C. (eds) Advances in Information Systems Development. Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, vol 34. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22993-1_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22993-1_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-22992-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-22993-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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