Differences betw een Chinese and Australian students: some implications for distance educators. First year undergraduate Business and Computing Chinese students studying on-campus in Australia and from Confucian cultural heritage societies were compared with first year Australian undergraduate students of the same courses using Entwistle and Ramsden‟s (1983) Approaches to Studying Inventory (ASI). Results were analysed for each ASI scale using analyses of variance. Significant differences were shown for a number of scales, with implications for the design and delivery of effective off-shore distance education directed towards Confucian heritage cultures. The results are discussed in a context of the factor structure identified for Chinese students by Smith, Miller and Crassini (1998) with a view to informing instructional decision-making. Introduction Education providers have not been slow to realise the potential for the Internet to provide education and training across international borders.Tiffin (1998) has provided an analysis of the nine forms of virtualuniversity that he sees emerging in the late 1990s, ranging from the traditional university reinventing itself to provide instruction on the world-wide web, through corporate virtual universities providing on-line education programs to the corporate sector, national virtual universities, cultural virtual universities, to a global virtual university. Caution on thefuture development of these ventures has been argued forcefully by Cunningham, Tapsall, Ryan, Stedman, Bagdon and Flew (1997) who point out that some of the enthusiasm for virtual universities that find success across international borders and in different cultures ignores local controls and also ignores choices...
