Now imagine that these three people are talking in a virtual room—and throw in an economics professor from Germany, an HR professional from India and a CFO from Canada—and you have an idea of the conversation in the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Business Ethics for the Real World, which the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics has been offering for the past year.
While the debate about the completion rate and efficacy of MOOCs rages on, one thing is not under dispute. These courses bring together an amazingly diverse group of students, who might otherwise never have interacted with so many people from other cultures. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that, in the first year of the MOOC platform EdX, two-thirds of the students came from countries outside North America.
This wide geographical range makes the online discussions in the MOOC fascinating, not least because there mostly seems to be no culture-based difference in what students take to be ethical. In the case of the job reference described above, one might imagine that people from cultures that place a high value on friend and kinship loyalty would be likely to recommend a friend even if he were not qualified. But after studying 204 student responses, we could detect no regional pattern.
This shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, the Golden Rule—do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself—is found in Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and many other religions.
But even when responses didn’t vary by geography, students brought insights from their culture into the conversation. The majority of students from across the world suggested that Greg tell his boss about his friend but be honest about both his good qualities and the holes in his resume. Many noted that the term “topnotch” was subjective. One pointed out that the definition of “topnotch” might vary by culture: “If this was China,” he wrote, “the element of trust (between friends) could easily make a candidate topnotch.” In other words, people can look through the same ethical lens and see different things.
Occasionally, there were marked differences in how students responded to ethical dilemmas. During the course of the MOOCs, participants were invited to propose their own dilemmas for feedback from others in the course. In one, a financial analyst shared this challenge: She was helping her company evaluate bids for a project. Her boss asked her to show one of four bidders the proposals from the other three. What should she do?
