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DIFFERENCES OBSERVED

Cultural and institutional issues and workarounds based on real-life project experience

Cultural differences

In this type of a course, the communication is one of the most important factors for success of the project. Since all students at the beginning of the course didn’t know each other at all, it was important that they got to know each other very soon and learned each other’s advantages, but also disadvantages. When they are cooperating with other students from the same environment they are able to evaluate other person much faster than in the case of cultural difference. The way students work, differs in Croatia and Sweden, which was the source of a large number of misunderstandings at the beginning of each team's project.
 
This is in no way surprising. Swedish culture is a typical "Low-context" (explicit) culture, while Croatia fits well in the "High-context" (implicit) culture model, typical for the Mediterranean region. Differences include time needed for building trust and creating relationships, notion of time (deadlines), space and the way verbal and written agreements are understood. Swedish culture is typical "monochronic", taking agreed schedules very seriously, while Croatian is more "polychronic", where commitments are achieved only if possible and are understood more as guidelines then a strict obligation. This problem was tackled at the beginning of the DSD course and students were warned to take this into consideration when communicating with each other.

Croatian characteristics Swedish characteristics


In order to successfully finish the project, students very soon realized the importance of understanding. At the very beginning all students had to give their own evaluation of their capabilities to their project leader. That evaluation had to be realistic since the success of the complete project depended on it. Students have a lot of difficulties to acknowledge their weaknesses especially when they are in an environment that is unknown to them. Additional problem arose when they didn’t know what kind of knowledge is expected. In development of software products, students didn’t know what technologies were covered in the curriculum in the other country and were very worried whether they would be able to do all that was expected from them.

The teams in which all members knew all team weaknesses, but also its strengths, achieved much better results, since they tried to adapt the project that was given to them to their abilities. Teams which didn't built enough trust experienced a lot of problems even at the very beginning of the project. Due to the cultural differences students had a hard time distinguishing other student’s cultural differences from their weaknesses, which is a big problem in building trust.

One way of establishing trust is to introduce discipline in the communication. Another way is to request regular progress report from all teams. These requests force students to give real estimation of their own capabilities to the other students, which builds trust. In order to ensure success of the project it is important to define all milestones at the beginning of the project and the expected results for each of them. It is also important to clearly define all vaguely defined areas of the project and responsibilities of each team member.

Teams that have managed to follow these rules achieved much higher success than those where the role of each member was not precisely defined or some parts of the project remained unclear.

Institutional differences

Another "cultural" difference, this time institutional, concerned the ECTS points.

Students who enrolled into the DSD course in Croatia (last semester, the count was 19) were enabled by the Swedish partner to officially enroll to the Mälardalen University (MdH). They were given 7.5 ECTS points for participating in the DSD course. Croatian students who enrolled in MdH were also credited with 7.5 ECTS. However, Croatian students who took part in the course got only 4 ECTS points for the same course from the Croatian side (FER), which was quite confusing and non-stimulating. The Bologna process will have to mature in Croatia before such obvious injustices are properly addressed.