Nationality and Gender Biases in Multicultural Online Learning Environments: The Effects of Anonymity

Online learning environments eliminate geographical barriers and enable new forms of collaboration between students at large scale. Self-presentation within such environments affects how students interact with learning content and with each other. We explore how anonymity/identifiability in user profile design impacts student interactions in a large multicultural classroom across two geographical locations. After triangulating 150,000 online interactions with questionnaires and focus groups, we provide three major findings. First, being identifiable had a significant impact on how students accessed and rated content created by their peers. Second, when identifiable, cultural differences became more prominent, leading some students to avoid content created by classmates of certain nationalities. Finally, when students interacted with their real identities, there were significant and negative gender effects which were absent when students were anonymous. These findings contribute to our understanding of social dynamics within multicultural learning environments, and raise practical implications for tool design.