Instructional design and culturally diverse learners

California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) is a new comprehensive university founded in 1994 at the Old Fort Ord Army Base. One of its core missions is to serve the diverse people of California and to provide access to traditionally undeserved populations. To reach this goal, CSUMB has taken a different approach to typical college organizational structure. The institution is organized around Centers and Institutes that cluster related but historically separate disciplines. The goal is to facilitate better cross discipline collaboration and communication among disciplines. Cultural diversity is customarily ignored and is almost never considered in developing a delivery strategy. During the process of designing the initial instructional design course we began to wonder if there was a way to better integrate cultural differences within traditional instructional design methodology. To do this would be consistent with the mission of the university of not just providing access but also helping to ensure the success of typically undeserved student populations within computer science disciplines. The authors used an approach by Samovar, Porter and Stefani that divides cultures into 2 basic groups that they call High and Low Context. This paper reports on their findings and recommendations.