Language MOOCs: Providing Learning, Transcending Boundaries 9783110422504, 9783110420067

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Elena Martin Monje and Elena Bárcena Madera (Eds.) Language MOOCs: Providing Learning, Transcending Boundaries

Elena Martin Monje and Elena Bárcena Madera (Eds.)

Language MOOCs: Providing Learning, Transcending Boundaries Managing Editor: Miguel Fernández Language Editor: Deborah A. Holman

Published by De Gruyter Open Ltd, Warsaw/Berlin Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license, which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.

© 2014 Elena Martin Monje and Elena Bárcena Madera (Eds.) ISBN: 978-3-11-042250-4 e-ISBN: 978-3-11-042006-7 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. Managing Editor: Miguel Fernández Language Editor: Deborah A. Holman www.degruyteropen.com Cover illustration: © Thinkstock/Wavebreakmedia Ltd Complimentary copy, not for sale.

Contents List of contributing authors 

 X

Elena Bárcena, Elena Martín-Monje 1 Introduction. Language MOOCs: an Emerging Field  1.1 Introduction   1 1.2 The Availability of Language MOOCs   4 1.3 The Contents of this Book   8 1.4 Some Final Remarks    10 Appendix   13

 1

Maggie Sokolik 2 What Constitutes an Effective Language MOOC?   16 2.1 Introduction   16 2.2 cMOOCs, xMOOCs   17 2.2.1 On not Taking a Cue from CALL   19 2.2.2 The Opportunity for an LMOOC   20 2.3 Making the Massive Human(e)   20 2.3.1 Engagement and Interaction   21 2.3.2 Student Self-Organization in LMOOCs   22 2.3.3 Instructor Presence   22 2.3.4 An LMOOC Structure for Engagement   23 2.3.5 Talking Heads — Good Music, Bad Video   23 2.3.6 LMOOC Approach for Video Engagement   24 2.3.7 Forms of Assessment   24 2.3.7.1 Peer-Assessment   24 2.3.7.2 LMOOCs and Assessment   25 2.3.8 My MOOC is Bigger than your MOOC   25 2.3.8.1 Conflating Numbers with Success   26 2.3.8.2 There are No Dropouts Here   26 2.3.9 Defining Success in an LMOOC   26 2.4 Conclusion   27 2.4.1 Summary: Tips for a Successful LMOOC   27 Appendix   31 António Moreira Teixeira, José Mota 3

A Proposal for the Methodological Design of Collaborative Language MOOCs   33

The Rise of Digital Massive Open Education   33 The MOOC Phenomenon: between Large-Scale Content Distribution and Massive Collaborative Learning   33 3.1.2 The iMOOC Approach: a Possible Synthesis?   35 3.2 Massive Language Education   37 3.2.1 The Importance of Competence-Based Learning for Language Education in a 21st Century Setting   37 3.2.2 Some Challenges in Designing Language Learning MOOCs   39 3.2.3 Designing Collaborative Language MOOCs Based on the iMOOC Approach   40 3.2.3.1 Technological Environment   41 3.2.3.2 Course Duration   41 3.2.3.3 Learning Process   42 3.2.3.4 Teacher’s Role   42 3.2.3.5 Support Team   42 3.2.3.6 Resources   43 3.2.3.7 Activities/Tasks   43 3.2.3.8 Bank of Challenges   43 3.2.3.9 Oral Practice   44 3.2.3.10 Feedback   45 3.2.3.11 Certificate of Completion   45 3.2.3.12 Formal Accreditation   45 3.3 Final Remarks   45

3.1 3.1.1

Tita Beaven, Tatiana Codreanu, Alix Creuzé  48 4 Motivation in a Language MOOC: Issues for Course Designers  4.1 Introduction   48 4.2 Context: the MOOC Travailler en Français   51 4.3 Research Methods   53 4.4 Profile of the Travailler En Français MOOC Participant   54 4.5 Analytics: Platform Use and Social Media Metrics   55 4.6 Regular Student Self-Evaluation   57 4.7 Intrinsic Motivation   60 4.8 Conclusion   62 Mª Dolores Castrillo de Larreta-Azelain 5 Language Teaching in MOOCs: the Integral Role of the Instructor  5.1 Introduction   67 5.2 Background: Online Language Teaching   68 5.3 Redefining the Teacher’s Role in Language MOOCs   70

 67

5.3.1

Criticism of G. Salmon’s 5-Step Model: Why it is not Valid for MOOCs   71 5.4 A Proposed Framework for MOOC Language Teaching   72 5.4.1 Before the MOOC: the Teacher as Structure Designer and Content Generator   73 5.4.1.1 MOOC Structure Designer   73 5.4.1.2 Content Expert/ Content Creator/ Content Facilitator   74 5.4.1.3 Assessment Designer/Evaluator   76 5.4.1.4 Designing and Structuring Communication Tools   79 5.4.2 Throughout the MOOC: New Forum Curator and Facilitator Roles   80 5.4.2.1 The Role of the Teacher as Course Manager and Administrator   83 5.4.3 Before, during, and after the MOOC: the Teacher’s Role as Researcher   85 5.5 Conclusion   86 Bibliography and Webliography   87 Timothy Read  91 6 The Architectonics of Language MOOCs  6.1 Introduction   91 6.2 Language MOOCs   93 6.3 Language CMOOCS vs. XMOOCS   99 6.4 Conclusion   102 Covadonga Rodrigo 7 Accessibility in Language MOOCs   106 7.1 Introduction   106 7.2 ICT Access and its Use by People with Disabilities   108 7.2.1 MOOCs Opportunity for Social Inclusion   109 7.3 Demands of Usability and Accessibility in MOOCs Services   111 7.3.1 Accessible Interfaces   113 7.3.2 Learning Resources Accessibility   114 7.3.2.1 Accessible Videolectures   115 7.3.2.2 Accessible PDF Document Considerations   115 7.3.2.3 Accessible Flash Multimedia Restrictions   117 7.4 Strategies for Improving Usability and Accessibility in MOOC Services   117 7.4.1 Learning Resources Metadata to Improve Accessibility   118 7.4.2 Assessment Accessibility   119 7.4.3 Enabling User Adaptable Interfaces   119 7.4.4 Multimodal Adaptive Interfaces   120

7.4.5 Accessibility Standards for Learner Profiling   121 7.4.6 User Experience and User-Centred Design Model   122 7.5 Conclusion   123 Inma Álvarez  127 8 Ethical and Aesthetic Considerations in Language Moocs  8.1 Introduction   127 8.2 Ethics and Aesthetics in Language Education   128 8.2.1 The Intercultural Agenda and Beyond   129 8.2.2 Languages and Aesthetic Sensibilities   130 8.3 Challenges and Possibilities in the Digital Era   131 8.3.1 New Ethical and Aesthetic Considerations   132 8.3.2 Languages in ELearning Environments   133 8.4 Openness and Open Initiatives’ Ethical Agenda   134 8.4.1 Opening to a Hyperdemocracy   135 8.4.2 Open Initiatives   135 8.4.3 Addressing the Global Masses   136 8.5 Languaging in MOOCS   138 8.6 Conclusions: Researching for the Future   139 Fernando Rubio 9 Teaching Pronunciation and Comprehensibility in a Language MOOC 143 9.1 Introduction   143 9.2 The Role of Feedback   144 9.2.1 Feedback and Pronunciation Instruction   145 9.2.2 Feedback and Online Affordances   146 9.3 Structure of the Courses   147 9.4 Method   150 9.4.1 Participants   150 9.4.2 Procedures   150 9.5 Results   152 9.6 Discussion   155 9.7 Conclusions   156 Appendix    160 Jozef Colpaert 10

Conclusion. Reflections on Present and Future: towards an Ontological Approach to LMOOCs   161 10.1 Introduction   161

10.2 To MOOC or not to MOOC, that’s the Question   162 10.3 Ontology of the LMOOC   163 10.3.1 Blurred Ontologies: Pervasive but Persuasive   163 10.3.2 The LMOOC as Ontology   165 10.4 LMOOCs from an Educational Engineering Point of View  10.5 LMOOCs from a CALL Research Point of View   168 10.6 The Suggested Path for LMOOCs   169 10.7 Conclusion   170 Index 

 173

 166

List of contributing authors Elena Bárcena

Mª Dolores Castrillo de Larreta-Azelain

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain

Introduction

Chapter 5

Elena Martín-Monje

Timothy Read

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain

Introduction

Chapter 6

Maggie Sokolik

Covadonga Rodrigo

University of California, Berkeley, USA Chapter 2

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain – Fundación Vodafone Chair, Spain

António Moreira Teixeira

Chapter 7

European Distance and E-learning Network, United Kingdom

Inma Álvarez

Chapter 3

The Open University, United Kingdom Chapter 8

José Mota LE@D – Laboratory of Distance Education and eLearning [http://lead.uab.pt]

Fernando Rubio

Universidade Aberta, Portugal

Chapter 9

University of Utah, United States of America

Chapter 3 Jozef Colpaert Tita Beaven

Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium

The Open University, United Kingdom

Chapter 10

Chapter 4 Tatiana Codreanu Laboratoire ICAR, France Chapter 4 Alix Creuzé Institut Français, Spain Chapter 4

Elena Bárcena, Elena Martín-Monje

1 Introduction. Language MOOCs: an Emerging Field Abstract: In this article the emerging field of Language MOOCs (LMOOCs) is

presented. Firstly, the MOOC phenomenon is introduced as a revolutionary and challenging model within the related fields of formal education, lifelong learning and non-formal training, and its impact worldwide is analysed in the light of practical considerations. Secondly, the question of the suitability of different subject matters to be taught in the MOOC format is addressed, with special attention to languages. Thirdly, evidence of the presence of LMOOCs in the main platforms and providers worldwide is presented together with that of the existence of related research in the literature and in international congresses, all of which provides a context and a justification to the present text. Fourthly and finally, the contents of this text are briefly described, together with its intended audience and a few final remarks on the foreseeable research directions within the field of LMOOCs. Keywords: second language learning, language MOOCs

1.1 Introduction This book presents an initial analysis of theoretical and methodological issues underlying Language MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and empirical evidence on their potential for the development of language communicative competences, based upon previously unpublished research. Language MOOCs (or LMOOCs) are dedicated Web-based online courses for second languages with unrestricted access and potentially unlimited participation. The ‘MOOC concept’ is far from new, since courses with such characteristics have been around for considerable time before Cormier explicitly used the term ‘MOOC’ in 2008 (Siemens, 2012). MOOCs are arguably the natural evolution of OERs (Open Educational Resources), which are freely accessible learning materials and media to be used for learning/teaching and assessment. Although the differences between MOOCs and OERs are self-evident, they are growing as new didactic approaches to the former appear, given the highly innovative and exploratory nature of the field. The much publicized objective of the MOOC educational model is to promote learning for a huge number of people with a shared interest, by removing most of the usual barriers for access and attendance (such as numerus clausus, deadlines, previous certifications and grades, and fees) (Lewin, 2012; Skiba, 2012), while preserving all/most of the defining features of an academic course (a subject matter, one or more learning goals, materials, a method with activities, tasks, etc., and, in © 2014 Elena Bárcena, Elena Martín-Monje This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License

2 

 Introduction. Language MOOCs: an Emerging Field

some cases, the achievement of a certain number of credits and/or a certificate at the end). It is not surprising, therefore, that despite the conflict with the interests of formal educational institutions (and their seemingly opposite business model) and the criticisms expressed by some academicians (Romeo, 2012; Jackson, 2013), MOOCs are having a significant impact on the online educational community, with hundreds of thousands of people undertaking these courses worldwide. It is not only about the economic attractiveness or the flexibility of being able to come and go from a course at will. As potential student (that is to say, someone who wants to study something or undergo some sort of highly specific training to update his/her academic/professional capabilities in order to cope with current demands) numbers increase, possibly to more than 100 million by 2020, it will be simply impossible to attend such demand in standard universities and other similar educational establishments (Read & Bárcena, in press). For the reasons highlighted above, MOOCs represent a challenge to the standard institutional model of education for authorities and particularly for course developers, curators and facilitators. At this moment, there are several well-established MOOC platforms containing thousands of teaching units (e.g., www.moocs.co) aimed at an extremely diverse public. They include topics coming from a wide range of academic disciplines such as modern astrophysics, the Spanish 1978 Constitution, to more skillbased subject matters like engineering mechanics and written Mandarin Chinese, professional training like inspiring leadership through emotional intelligence and an introduction to financial accounting, and other topics, such as, how to register in an American university, how to organize your time and money and, of course, MOOC design (www.mooc-list.com). Without attempting to belittle the enormous challenge involved in designing and undertaking certain MOOCs, there is currently no evidence of any topic that cannot be taught using this educational model. However, it must be acknowledged that, leaving aside the different quality levels in the instructional design of individual MOOCs, there are different degrees of success with which a given subject can be expected to be effectively taught in a MOOC per se, as certain reports have pointed out (Viswanathan, 2012; Bruff et al., 2013). Before considering the theoretical suitability of MOOCs for learning second languages, the following aspects need to be taken into account: firstly, language learning is not only knowledge-based, in the sense that it requires the rather passive assimilation of vocabulary items and combinatory rules, but is mainly skill-based, in that it involves putting into practice an intricate array of receptive, productive and interactive verbal (and non-verbal) functional capabilities, whose role in the overall success of the communicative act is generally considered to be more prominent than that of the formal or organizational elements (Halliday, 1993; Whong, 2011). Secondly, and linked to the previous point, assuming that the goal of language learning is language use, it is only common sense to infer that the former should entail considerable practice of the latter, just like a student must play the piano to become a pianist or take photographs to become a photographer. Thirdly, all variables being equal, the mind



Introduction  

 3

that learns (a language) best is the proactive and engaged mind with its high order skills (relating, contrasting, criticising, inquiring, justifying, deducing, etc.) activated, rather than just memorization and mechanical reproduction. Finally, after infancy, one is generally assumed to gradually lose some of the innate language acquisition abilities and acquire a more rule-based cognitive profile (e.g., Meltzoff & Prinz, 2002). Hence, the language learner is likely to benefit from the well-known explicit type of learning model, something partly based on face-to-face/textual/visual explanations with illustrative examples followed by some interesting and creative form of practice. Part of this process will be more effective if undertaken individually, particularly for the improvement of certain areas of language, such as pronunciation or punctuation, as it provides the necessary flexibility and adaptation to personal learning styles, rhythms and circumstances, and enhances metacognitive processes. Furthermore, if the successful language learner is expected to assume an active role in his/her own learning, since knowledge is generally self-constructed rather than transferred, s/he requires the opportunity to build strategies and connections that are significant for him/her at a given moment in time, in an adaptive manner. However, given the intrinsically social nature of verbal communication, negotiating meaning, engaging in group work, providing mutual assistance, and constructing and sharing new knowledge and skills collaboratively with others have all been widely praised in the second language learning literature (Nunan, 1992; Warschauer & Kern, 2000). Although learners’ production is bound to contain inaccuracies and the validity of peer feedback, therefore, may not always be reliable, language learning is no longer restricted to the idea of the ceaseless imitation of an ideal, the ‘flawless’ performance of a single teacher (and/or set of quality recognized materials). Nowadays, the ultimate objective of language learning is generally accepted to be proficient engagement in intelligible, empathic, and effective verbal performance, in a varied set of contexts and situations, with different types of interlocutors (Council of Europe, 2001; The National Capital Language Resource Center, 2003). The authors claim that these, among other principles, underlie language learning, and that, on this basis, open online courses can be effectively designed to facilitate the development of communicative language capabilities for potentially massive and highly heterogeneous groups, whose only common goal is their desire to learn a given language. Although it is premature to claim that entire languages can be learnt effectively online, particularly when compared to classroom-based instruction, the vast amount of research that has been undertaken in the field of CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) for several decades now (e.g., Warschauer, 1993; Bax, 2003; Yang, 2010) has demonstrated the suitability of computer usage for enhancing features which, in turn, are generally accepted to promote language learning (such as an increase of exposure time to the language or interlocutor diversification) and also the development, practice and improvement of discrete language communicative competences. This is particularly the case in the age of digital communication (not only in the international professional environment but also at social and

4 

 Introduction. Language MOOCs: an Emerging Field

personal levels), which puts an end to the long-term debate about the inadequacy of computer-based communication for the development of certain verbal capabilities (Meurant, 2009). The question raised here is whether the challenging MOOC scenario (with potentially huge numbers of heterogeneous students to whom constraints in terms of guidelines, deadlines, etc., must be kept to a minimum) can be turned into an opportunity to have many motivated and proactive students undertaking highly valuable peer-to-peer interaction to some degree. The following section presents some evidence that this can, in fact, be achieved.

1.2 The Availability of Language MOOCs The location of LMOOCs on the different platforms available around the world, ranging from the main MOOC providers (such as Coursera, edX, or Udacity) to the smaller ones which run on a single university’s platform (e.g., UNED COMA), was tracked by the authors using MOOC search engines such as Class Central, MOOC List, MOOCs Engine, My Education Path, and Open Education Europa. The validity of the results is limited because there are more than forty different major MOOC providers1 plus dozens of universities that have created their own platform to showcase their MOOCs, the number of which grow exponentially and whose existence is not consistently reported on the different search engines. Table 1.1 shows the presence of LMOOCs across platforms: Table 1.1: A sample of platforms that offer LMOOCs (2014) Name of platform

URL

No. of LMOOCs

Canvas

https://www.canvas.net/

1

Coursera

https://www.coursera.org/

3

EdX

https://www.edx.org/

3

Future Learn

https://www.futurelearn.com/

1

Instreamia

http://www.instreamia.com/class/

1

MiriadaX

https://www.miriadax.net/

4

Open 2 Study

https://www.open2study.com/

1

Open Learning

https://www.openlearning.com/

Open Learning Initiative

OLI.cmu.edu

2

1 http://www.technoduet.com/a-comprehensive-list-of-mooc-massive-open-online-courses-providers/



The Availability of Language MOOCs 

 5

Table 1.1: A sample of platforms that offer LMOOCs (2014)

continued

The Mixxer

http://www.language-exchanges.org/

2

UCAM Unidad MOOC

http://www.ucam.edu/estudios/mooc

1

UNED COMA

https://unedcoma.es/

3

Universidad Quantum

http://universidadquantum.es/

1

UPV[X]

http://www.upvx.es/

2

TOTAL

26

The host institutions of LMOOCs are prestigious universities from all over the world: United States of America (e.g., University of California, Berkeley), Australia (e.g., University of New South Wales), Spain (e.g., UNED), United Kingdom (e.g., University of Reading) and Mexico (Tecnológico de Monterrey), to name a few. For a representative list of LMOOCs and related data (platform on which it is located, host institution, country, language offered, title of the course and URL), see the appendix. Figure 1.1 shows the distribution of LMOOCs according to the country of origin:

Figure 1.1: Countries offering LMOOCs

As Figure 1.1 illustrates, the most prolific countries in the world for LMOOCs are the United States of America and Spain and, correspondingly, the most popular languages offered are English and Spanish2, which expectedly coincide with some of the

2  Only MOOCs specifically related to second language learning have been included in this study. Courses dealing with theoretical linguistics (e.g., “The structure of English”, from Philipps-Universität Marbug, Germany), other areas of applied linguistics (e.g., “Corpus linguistics: method, analysis, interpretation”, from Lancaster University; “An Open Translation MOOC”, from The Open University, both in the United Kingdom; “Interpretación simultánea inglés-español: ejercicios de preparación”, from Universitat Jaume I, Spain), or even theoretical courses dealing with didactics and language teaching methodology (e.g., “ELT Techniques: Listening and Pronunciation”, from WizIQ, USA) have not been considered.

6 

 Introduction. Language MOOCs: an Emerging Field

top three languages in the world in the number of native speakers. Table 1.2 shows a summary of the languages offered by LMOOCs according to the compilation made: Table 1.2: Languages offered in the LMOOCs of the collected sample Language

No. of MOOCs

Chinese

2

English

11

French

1

German

2

Spanish

8

Valencian

2

TOTAL

26

As has been noted previously, LMOOCs are in the very early stage of development. It is, thus, understandable that they have undergone little research up until now, neither of an empirical nor of a theoretical nature. However, the authors have searched for academic books, journal articles and conference papers dealing with LMOOCs. Entries in blogs, wikis or other pieces of online writing of a more informative nature have not been taken into account, in an attempt to keep the analysis of this field of research within the boundaries of scholarly publications, i.e., the conventional forms of dissemination of expert reviewed academic research. The texts considered are those included in refereed journals between 2011, the year when the development of MOOCs started spreading internationally, and 2014. In addition to research articles published in scholarly journals, the review also incorporated monographic volumes and published dissertation studies. The underlying rationale was to diversify the study and make it more comprehensive. These journal articles, books, book chapters and dissertations were selected through keyword search in six databases (EBSCO Host, ERIC, IEEEXplore Digital Library, JSTOR Education, Linceo+ [provided by UNED and engineered by ProQuest Summon™ Serial Solutions], MLA International Bibliography, and Sage Full-Text Collection). The keywords chosen for the search were: ‘massive’, ‘open’, ‘online’, ‘course’, and ‘language’. This procedure returned an extremely low number of hits and showed that there are no monographic volumes on LMOOCs published to date, no finished dissertations and only five scholarly articles in refereed journals (one in 2012 and four in 2013). Table 1.3 shows these published articles:



The Availability of Language MOOCs 

 7

Table 1.3: Distribution of academic literature on LMOOCs in specialized journals Journal title

No. of articles

Author and date

CALICO Journal

1

Schulze & Smith, 2013

Language Learning & Technology

1

Godwin-Jones, 2012

The Linguist

1

Winkler, 2013

TESL-EJ

2

Stevens, 2013a Stevens, 2013b

The dates of publication, the lack of books and published dissertations and the scarcity of papers are, at present, the consequence of the incipient stage of this field of research. For this reason, the scope of this study was widened subsequently to include other search engines, such as Google Scholar and social presentation repositories, such as SlideShare (http://www.slideshare.net). Furthermore, conference proceedings were included in the exploration. None of the five scholarly publications on LMOOCs were based on empirical research. It is still early for Ph.D. dissertations, although a Google Scholar search highlighted one instance of undergoing student research on LMOOCs at UNED, Spain (https://www.miriadax.net/web/patventura/perfil). No monographic volumes have been published on the subject so far. This fact makes the present volume the first book on LMOOCs, although there has been a recent announcement of a volume in the CALICO’s Monograph Book Series for 2015 entitled Researching Language Learner Interaction Online: From Social Media to MOOCs, to be edited by Dixon & Thomas (https://calico.org/CFPVolume13.pdf). The conference proceedings compiled show that in 2013 and 2014 some empirical research on LMOOCs has taken place, although this work has not yet reached the scholarly status of refereed journal articles. Table 1.4 summarizes these findings. Furthermore, at the time of writing this article, there are two further conferences announced which have LMOOCs as their focus: in Europe, TISLID’14 (http://www. tislid14.es), organised by UNED and Universidad de Salamanca in Spain, with one of the key strands on LMOOCs; and simultaneously in America, CALICO Conference 2014 (https://calico.org/page.php?id=456) in USA, whose motto this year is “Open, Online, Massive: The Future of Language Learning?”. All the data in this study distinctively show an incipient, but expanding, interest in the field of LMOOCs on the part of the research community, and provide the preliminary context for this pioneering book whose contents are described in the following section.

8 

 Introduction. Language MOOCs: an Emerging Field

Table 1.4: Distribution of research on LMOOCs in specialised conferences Conference

No. of papers

Author and date

PLC Symposium 2013 (Philadelphia, USA)

1

Rubio, 2013

UNED-ICDE 2013 (Madrid, Spain)

1

Martín-Monje et al., 2013

EMOOCs 2014 (Lausanne, Switzerland)

1

Bárcena et al., 2014

Massive Open Online Courses in the Arts and Humanities 2014 (Preston, UK)

1

E-Learning Symposium 2014 (Southampton, UK))

2

INTED 2014 (Valencia, Spain)

1

Murray et al., 2014 Davis, 2014 Watson, 2014 Perifanou & Economides, 2014

1.3 The Contents of this Book As noted throughout this article, MOOCs, including LMOOCs, are generating interest and expectation in the contexts of university education, lifelong learning and online training in general. Accordingly, there are a growing number of these courses available, although little related scholarly research has been published until now. Language MOOCs: providing learning, transcending boundaries seeks to fill that gap by offering an analysis of the field from different theoretical and methodological perspectives; namely, pedagogical, linguistic, technological, sociological, ethical and aesthetical. This book is divided into ten chapters that start by covering the most central aspects of LMOOCs (e.g., pedagogical, linguistic) and move towards more peripheral ones (e.g., sociological, ethical). Thus, after this introductory chapter, chapter two, by Maggie Sokolik (University of California, Berkeley, USA), reflects on the features that make an effective LMOOC, arguing in favour of a combination of the philosophy behind cMOOCs (connectivist MOOCs) and the structure accomplished in the socalled xMOOCs (a term based on the idea of MOOCs as eXtensions), which are provided by the main MOOC platforms and much more regulated and tightly organised. Furthermore, engagement, community, membership, communication and creativity are highlighted as key features for effective LMOOCs. Chapter three, by António Moreira Teixeira (European Distance and ELearning Network, Portugal) and José Mota (Universidade Aberta, Portugal), proposes a methodological model for the creation of



The Contents of this Book 

 9

collaborative LMOOCs, based on the success of iMOOCs, which focus on the issues of individual responsibility, interaction, interpersonal relationships, innovation and inclusion. Chapter four, by Tita Beaven (The Open University, United Kingdom), Tatiana Codreanu (Laboratoire ICAR, France) and Alix Creuzé (Institut Français, Spain), focuses on the importance of motivation in LMOOCs and includes supporting empirical data. The authors provide an insightful profile of LMOOC participants, exploring their motivation and expectations prior to undertaking the course and reviewing their perceptions once finished. Based on their own findings, they provide some recommendations for LMOOC designers on motivating learners and keeping them engaged. Chapter five also offers further valuable empirical research. Its author, Mª Dolores Castrillo de Larreta-Azelain (UNED, Spain), is the creator of the first MOOC to gain a prize in her country and in this article she shares her musings on the crucial, albeit complex, role of the instructor in an LMOOC, identifying his/her main roles and competences, both from a theoretical and a practical point of view. Chapter six, by Fernando Rubio (Utah University, United States of America), analyses the issue of comprehensibility contrastively between a second language pronunciation MOOC and a traditional face-to-face course, both typically with highly different types and amounts of student feedback. The different aspects of both learning formats are analysed, giving particularly positive results for the LMOOC. Chapter seven, written by Timothy Read (UNED, Spain), moves on to deal with architectural aspects of LMOOCs. It analyses what constitutes a suitable platform or provider for this type of course and the associated tool set, resources and activities, and some recommendations are made about how such courses should be built from a technological perspective. Chapter eight, by Covadonga Rodrigo (Fundación Vodafone, Spain), focuses on the aspects within LMOOCs which benefit disabled people, as they allow students to learn at their own pace, collaborate to build knowledge together and improve their social inclusion, and proposes strategies regarding the improvement of accessibility in LMOOCs and references to the relevant standards. Chapter nine, by Inma Álvarez (The Open University, United Kingdom), deals with an uncommon topic: the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of LMOOCs. The article specifically questions and attempts to answer how new language learning environments like LMOOCs have impacted the ethics and aesthetics of language education in general. The different elements that make up such environments are analysed from an ethical and aesthetic perspective, the relevance of all these considerations is justified, and their implications are presented in a broader context. Chapter ten, by Jozef Colpaert (Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium), analyses the key affordances and weaknesses of LMOOCs as presented in the previous chapters and situates them in the larger framework of an ontological specification, where future LMOOC research can be undertaken.

10 

 Introduction. Language MOOCs: an Emerging Field

1.4 Some Final Remarks This publication attempts to provide information to language teachers and students on how LMOOCs can help them achieve their learning goals. It is also aimed at researchers, who might be interested in the conceptualization, ontological and technical considerations of LMOOCs; undertaking empirical experimentation; analysing their specific instructional design and mechanics (including multimodality, methodology, feedback, didactic scaffolding, evaluation), the role of the teacher/peers, thousands of student results and other related questions; and obtaining insight about online second language learning in general through new course delivery formats. The authors claim that LMOOCs constitute a novel model with enormous educational potential but can also become true laboratories to study the intricacies of language learning. Furthermore, education and social authorities facing 21st century problems related to the limitations of academic institutions to face people’s language demands and needs in complex and densely populated societies, may have found in LMOOCs an opportunity for reflection. Thus, apart from regular formal education, the goals of LMOOCs can cover foundation building for lower level students; tailored training for people in need of updating specific second language capabilities; and also nonformal training for those outside formal education and even in vulnerable situations of professional and social exclusion. In that sense, LMOOCs might not only assist such learners towards meeting their language needs, but also build bridges towards formal education. However, given the early stage of development of this field, further research, both consisting of empirical experimentation and theoretical analysis, is needed to provide technological and methodological answers to its many operational challenges which, in turn, might shed light upon its unsolved business model. Furthermore, educational authorities are not likely to authorize the necessary investment in technological innovation and human resources until the most practical issues are settled and the whole project is found to be economically sustainable for the corresponding institutions. Finally, this book provides a mosaic-like view of LMOOC research, not only with respect to the geographical and institutional origin of its authors, but also to the heterogeneous nature of their respective academic backgrounds, and suggests directions for future development. As in other types of online language courses, the integration of the results of multidisciplinary research projects and teaching experiences related to LMOOCs is fundamental to make the field advance steadily and meet some of the real challenges and problems faced by individuals working and living in competitive multilingual societies in the 21st century.



Bibliography and Webliography 

 11

Bibliography and Webliography Bárcena, E.; Read, T.; Martín-Monje, E. & Castrillo, M.D. (2014). Analysing student participation in Foreign Language MOOCs: a case study. Proceedings of EMOOCs 2014: European MOOCs Stakeholders Summit: 11-17. Lausanne, Switzerland: École Polythechnique Fédérale de Lausanne & PAU Education. Bax, S. (2003). CALL – past, present and future. System 31(1): 13–28. Bruff, D.O.; Fisher, D.H.; McEwen, K.E. & Smith, B.E. (2013). Wrapping a MOOC: Student Perceptions of an Experiment in Blended Learning. MERLOT. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching 9(2). Retrieved May 3, 2014 from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol9no2/bruff_0613.htm Council of Europe (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, H. (2014). Why Make MOOCs? Paper presented at the Conference E-Learning Symposium 2014. Retrieved May 2, 2014 from https://www.llas.ac.uk/events/archive/6848 Godwin-Jones, R. (2012). Emerging Technologies: Challenging hegemonies in online learning. Language Learning & Technology, 16(2): 4-13. Halliday, M.A.K. (1993). Towards a language-based theory of learning. Linguistics and Education 5(2): 93-116. Jackson, N. (2013). On MOOCs; and some futures for Higher Education. Retrieved May 4, 2014 from http://noelbjackson.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/on-moocs-and-some-possible-futures-forhigher-ed/ Lewin, T. (2012). Instruction for Masses Knocks Down Campus Walls. The New York Times (March 4, 2012). Retrieved May 5, 2014 from http://massiveopenonlinecourses-repository.yolasite. com/resources/12_04-04-12-Tamar%20Lewin-Instruction%20for%20Masses%20Knocks%20 Down%20Campus%20Walls-NYT.pdf Martín-Monje, E.; Bárcena, E. & Read, T. (2013) Exploring the affordances of Massive Open Online Courses on second languages. Proceedings of UNED-ICDE (International Council for Open and Distance Education), Madrid: UNED. Meltzoff, A.N. & Prinz, W. (2002). The imitative mind. Development, Evolution and Brain Bases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meurant, R.C. (2009). The significance of second language digital literacy. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference of Computer Sciences and Convergence Information Technology: 369-374. Murray, L. et al. (2014). Developing and implementing collaborative evaluation approaches with MOOCs and SLA. Paper presented at the Conference Massive Open Online Courses in the Arts and Humanities. Retrieved May 3, 2014 from http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/ detail/2014/seminars/ah/gen911_uclan National Capital Language Resource Center (The) (2003). The Essentials of Language Teaching. Retrieved May 5th, 2014 from http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/goalsmethods/goal.htm Nunan, D. (1992). Collaborative Language Learning and Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perifanou, M.A. & Economides, A.A. (2014). MOOCs for Foreign Language Learning. An effort to explore and evaluate the first practices. Paper presented at the Conference INTED 2014: 8th International Technology, Education and Development Conference. Retrieved May 2, 2014 from http://www.slideshare.net/mariaperif/inted14perifanou-economides Read, T. & E. Bárcena (in press) Toward Mobile Assisted Language MOOCs. Furthering Higher Education Possibilities through Massive Open Online Courses. Lisbon: IGI Global.

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 Bibliography and Webliography

Romeo, K. (2012). Language MOOCs?. Academic Technology Specialists. Standford University Libraries. Retrieved May 2, 2014 from https://web.stanford.edu/group/ats/cgi-bin/ hivetalkin/?p=3011 Rubio, F. (2014). Language learning in a hyperconnected world. Paper presented at the conference PLC Symposium 2013, Fast Forward: Language Online. Retrieved May 1, 2014 from https://plc. sas.upenn.edu/events/plcsymposium2013 Schulze, M. & Smith, B. (2013). Computer-assisted Language Learning –The Times They Are A-Changin’ (Editorial). CALICO Journal 30(3): i-iii. Siemens, G. (2012). What is the theory underpinning our MOOCs? Elearnspace. Retrieved May 2, 2014 from http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/06/03/what-is-the-theory-that-underpinsour-moocs/ Skiba, D.J. (2012). Disruption in Higher Education: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Emerging Technologies, 33(6): 417. Retrieved April 30, 2014 from http://www.ucdenver.edu/ academics/colleges/pharmacy/facultystaff/Faculty/Documents/Retreat/D%20Skiba%20 MOOC%20010413.pdf Stevens, V. (2013a). What’s with the MOOCs?. TESL-EJ: Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, 16(4). Retrieved April 28, 2014 from http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/ volume16/ej64/ej64int/ Stevens, V. (2013b). LTMOOC and Instreamia. TESL-EJ: Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, 17(1). Retrieved April 29, 2014 from http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/ volume17/ej65/ej65int/ Viswanathan, R. (2012). Teaching and Learning through MOOC. Frontiers of Language and Teaching 3: 32-40. Warschauer M. (1996). Computer Assisted Language Learning: an Introduction. In Fotos S. (ed.) Multimedia language teaching, Tokyo: Logos International: 3-20. Warschauer, M. & Kern, R. (2000). Network-based Language Learning: Concepts and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watson, J. (2014). The Online Facilitator: Exploring the nature of the role in MOOCs and other online courses. Paper presented at the Conference E-Learning Symposium 2014. Retrieved May 2, 2014 from https://www.llas.ac.uk/events/archive/6848 Whong, M. (2011). Language Teaching: Linguistic Theory in Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Winkler, K. (2013). Where There’s a MOOC. The Linguist, 52(3), 16-17. Yang, Y. (2010). Computer-Assisted Language Learning Teaching: Theory and Practice. Journal of Language Teaching and Research 1(6): 909-912.

Appendix 

 13

Appendix Recopilation of Language MOOCs (2014) MOOC platform/ University/ initiative Institution

Country

Language Title of the offered course

URL of the course

Canvas https://www. canvas.net/

University of USA Utah

Spanish

Improving your https://www.canvas.net/ Spanish Pronun- courses/improving-yourciation spanish-pronunciation

Coursera https://www. coursera.org/

Universitat USA/Spain Autònoma de Barcelona

Spanish

Corrección y estilo en español

Coursera https://www. coursera.org/

Tecnológico USA/Mexico Spanish de Monterrey

Fundamentos de https://www.coursera. la escritura en org/course/escrituraesp español

Coursera https://www. coursera.org/

Duke Univer- USA sity

English

English Compo- https://www.coursera. sition I: Achiev- org/course/composition ing Expertise

EdX https://www. edx.org/

University of USA California, Berkeley

English

Principles of https://www.edx.org/ Written English, course/uc-berkeleyx/ Part 1 uc-berkeleyx-colwri21x-principles-1194#. U2PUMFcVeHg

EdX https://www. edx.org/

University of USA California, Berkeley

English

Principles of https://www.edx.org/ Written English, course/uc-berkeleyx/ Part 2 uc-berkeleyx-colwri22x-principles-1348#. U2PUKVcVeHg

EdX https://www. edx.org/

University of USA California, Berkeley

English

Principles of https://www.edx.org/ Written English, course/uc-berkeleyx/ Part 3 uc-berkeleyx-colwri23x-principles-1535#. U2PTxlcVeHg

Future Learn https://www. futurelearn. com/

University of United Reading Kingdom

English

A beginners’ https://www.futurelearn. guide to writing com/courses/english-forin English for study university study

Spanish

Spanish MOOC http://spanishmooc.com/

Instreamia Instreamia http://www. instreamia.com/ class/

USA

https://www.coursera. org/course/correccion

14 

 Appendix

MiriadaX https://www. miriadax.net/

Universidad Spain de Salamanca

Spanish

Español Salamanca A2

https://www.miriadax. net/web/espanol-salamanca-a2

MiriadaX https://www. miriadax.net/

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

Spain

English

Inglés Profesional/Professional English

https://www.miriadax. net/web/ingles_profesional

MiriadaX https://www. miriadax.net/

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

Spain

English

Empieza con el https://www.miriadax. Inglés: aprende net/web/ingles_1000_ las mil palabras palabras más usadas y sus posibilidad comunicativas

MiriadaX https://www. miriadax.net/

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

Spain

German

Alemán para https://www.miriadax. hispanoablan- net/web/aleman_histes: Nociones panohablantes fundamentales

Open Learning University of Australia https://www. New South openlearning. Wales com/

English

Using Sentence https://www.openlearnConnectors ing.com/courses/FoundationAcademienglish

Open Learning Carnegie USA Initiative Mellon UniverOLI.cmu.edu sity

French

Elementary French 1

https://oli.cmu.edu/ jcourse/webui/guest/ activity.do?context=66b0 f47680020ca600d89b07 ced3c385

Open Learning Carnegie USA Initiative Mellon UniverOLI.cmu.edu sity

Spanish

Elementary Spanish I

http://oli.cmu.edu/ courses/future-2/elementary-sp-i/

Open 2 Study https://www. open2study. com/

Chinese

Chinese Language and Culture

https://www.open2study. com/courses/chineselanguage-culture

Spanish

MOOC de http://www.languageEspañol: Curso exchanges.org/ abierto para node/106804 hablantes de inglés que deseen mejorar su español

South China Australia/ University of China Technology in Guangzhou

The Mixxer Dickinson http://www. College languageexchanges.org/

USA



Appendix  

 15

The Mixxer Dickinson http://www. College languageexchanges.org/

USA

English

English MOOC: http://www.languageOpen Course for exchanges.org/ Spanish Speak- node/106803 ers Learning English

UCAM Unidad MOOC http://www. ucam.edu/estudios/mooc

Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia

Spain

Spanish

Easy Spanish/ Español Fácil

http://easy-spanish. appspot.com/preview

UNED COMA https://unedcoma.es/

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

Spain

English

Inglés Profesional/Professional English

https://unedcoma.es/ course/ingles-profesional-professionalenglish/

UNED COMA https://unedcoma.es/

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

Spain

English

Empieza con el Inglés: aprende las mil palabras más usadas y sus posibilidad comunicativas

https://unedcoma.es/ course/empieza-con-elingles-aprende-las-milpalabraas-ma/

UNED COMA https://unedcoma.es/

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

Spain

German

Alemán para hispanoablantes: Nociones fundamentales

https://unedcoma.es/ course/aleman-para-hispanohablantes-nocionesfundamentaii/

Spain

Chinese

Curso de Iniciación al Mandarín

http://universidadquantum.es/

Universidad Quantum Quantum University http://universidadquantum. es/ UPV[X] http://www. upvx.es/

Universitat Spain Politècnica de València

Valencian Preparació nivellhttp://cursvalenciac1. C1 (Suficiència) upvx.es/ficha de Valencià

UPV[X] http://www. upvx.es/

Universitat Spain Politècnica de València

Valencian Preparació nivellhttp://cursvalenciac2. C2 (Superior) de upvx.es/ficha Valencià

Maggie Sokolik

2 What Constitutes an Effective Language MOOC? Abstract: Language MOOCs are in their early stage of development. Given this, we

have an opportunity to take from the best of current language learning theory and abandon both ineffective methodologies of the past, as well as methodologies of other fields. This is best accomplished by adopting the ideologies of cMOOCs, while maintaining some of the structure of xMOOCs needed to help students navigate complex technologies and information in languages that are not their own. Maximizing engagement, community membership, communication, and creativity will ensure that Language MOOCs, as we move forward, will offer exciting and engaging ways to interact with language as subject matter. Keywords: MOOC, xMOOC, cMOOC, second language learning, motivation, engagement, assessment

2.1 Introduction “All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience.” – Henry Miller

If MOOCs are in their infancy (cf. Marques, 2013), Language MOOCs are positively neonatal. Presently, only a handful of such MOOCs exist. Two of the largest purveyors of MOOCs, edX and Coursera, do not include ‘languages’ as a category in their directory of courses, and searching both (using communication or humanities as search keywords) reveals only a few such courses, all focused on English writing. Instreamia.com, a newer newcomer in this land of newcomers, bills itself as “the Future of Language Learning.” It launched in 2012, and currently offers three levels of Spanish for English speakers, and courses in business and academic English for Spanish and Portuguese speakers. Various sites offer materials in language learning, but they do not qualify as MOOCs, failing to incorporate one or more of the main concepts of a MOOC: Massive: enrollment is large, in the thousands, even tens of thousands of students. Open: enrollment is free and not restricted to students by age or geographic location. Online: the course takes place entirely online, with no required face-to-face (f2f) component. Course: the materials comprise a course, usually with a syllabus and schedule, with the guidance or presence of an instructor and/or instructional assistance.

© 2014 Maggie Sokolik This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License

Introduction 

 17

In fact, the promise of Language MOOCs seems to be downplayed in the literature, if not dismissed outright. In some cases, the reasons for this dismissal are vague, as in Stevens (2013): [F]or language learning, a MOOC would not be a good means of teaching grammatical structures, unless the students were tasked with learning grammar inferentially and from one another. In some theories of language learning, they would learn through being motivated to communicate with one another and through providing one another with linguistic data that they would be constantly processing. (p. 9)

It is unclear why, in this case, grammatical structures would be impervious to instruction, while concepts in other fields, such as programming language, biology, or economics escape such judgment. The underlying assumption is that inferential learning is the only way to teach language. Other arguments seem to rely on faulty premises, as in the discussion by Romeo (2012) as to why MOOCs are not appropriate in the English language-learning environment: ESL [English as a Second Language] is all about exactly what the MOOCs specifically, and selfstudy in general, cannot [sic] do. The whole reason that anyone even takes an ESL course is not out of curiosity, or general interest, it is because they have to.

The premise that no one takes an English course out of curiosity or interest is so clearly fallacious that it requires no rebuttal. Furthermore, even if it were true, there is ample evidence that extrinsic motivation is a legitimate reason for language learning that does not negate the idea of learner autonomy (cf. Schmidt, Boraie, & Kassabgy, 1996; Dörnyei, 2001). It is, however, because of the newness of Language MOOCs that we are presented with the opportunity to get it right—to capture the best of what we know about language learning as well as the best of what we know about online educational experiences, especially the successes and failures of previous MOOCs. We can, and should, allay the fears that MOOCs are merely a return to teacher-fronted, “drill and kill” language instruction that cannot, by its very medium, be successful at the task of teaching a language.

2.2 cMOOCs, xMOOCs “First we build the tools, then they build us.” – Marshall McLuhan

In their short lifespan, MOOCs no longer comprise a singular concept. They are already categorized, forming a new educational typology. Most notable is the bifurcation between cMOOCs, the original conception of a MOOC (Downes, 2008; 2013) and

18 

 What Constitutes an Effective Language MOOC?

xMOOCs. Connectivist MOOCs (the ‘c’ in cMOOC) were seen as distributed networks “in the sense that they do not run on a single website or with a centralized core of content; the content in cMOOCs is networked. Participants are encouraged to meet in locations of their choosing and organize themselves” (Mackness, 2013). In contrast, xMOOCs (the ‘x’ comes from the open course model originally formed as MITx, which was then joined by other universities, and has evolved into edX.org) are centralized networks “convened on a designated platform; … the course runs principally on the main platform, where interaction takes place in discussion forums” (Mackness, 2013). The advantages the cMOOC format is its emphasis on interaction and community building. In language learning, this seems to coincide neatly with the goals of most classroom pedagogy, especially that of the communicative language teaching (CLT) approach. This approach is characterized briefly as: [A] movement away from traditional lesson formats where the focus was on mastery of different items of grammar and practice was through controlled activities such as memorization of dialogs and drills, and toward the use of pair work activities, role plays, group work activities and project work. (Richards, 2006, p. 4)

The communicative approach is seen as one in which the focus is on the learner’s ability to use and adapt language in authentic situations. The cMOOC format fits well with the goals of CLT. The disadvantages of the cMOOC format are that it is often described as difficult to navigate, “overwhelming” and sometimes relying on materials that are inaccessible in some geographic locations (Jordan, 2013). Brennan (2013) states: Cognitive load, and Prior Knowledge are key here, at times ignored by Connectivism, and either dismissed or not designed for in both theory and practice. They have a huge determining effect on what we can learn, and how we learn it, and are particular issues for novice learners.

The added difficulty for language learning is that in a truly communicative MOOC, students are using the medium of instruction as the medium of communication. This increases the cognitive load in a different way than a complex content-area course in astronomy, for example, might. Imagine taking a computer programming course where every exchange had to be written in computer code—no ‘authentic’ language allowed. Layer that in a true cMOOC format, asking learners of a language to navigate a complex web written in the target language, and the overwhelming nature of the task multiplies. xMOOCs, on the other hand, provide what might be seen as a more “familiar” structure for learning. An instructor guides the course, often through a syllabus and a sequence of activities. xMOOCs are most often sponsored by universities, and thus, in some ways are seen to mimic the structure of university courses. It’s unfortunate that rather than a dichotomy between xMOOCs and cMOOCs, there has developed a kind of hierarchy, where many consider cMOOCs to be superior in form and function. For



cMOOCs, xMOOCs 

 19

example, Siemens (2012) states, “cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication”. There is a danger, however, in xMOOCs replicating the worst of what exists about online learning—rote drills, decontextualized language, inauthentic activities, intrusive interface, etc. As Caulfield (2013) states, “[I]f xMOOCs want to truly have persistent, effective communities they are going to have to build the community not around success in the course, but around larger, more authentic applications of course content”.

2.2.1 On not Taking a Cue from CALL Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), of course, has a much longer history than do MOOCs. CALL was originally conceived of as “the search for and study of applications of the computer in language teaching and learning” (Levy, 1997, p. 1). Early experiments with CALL date back to the days of mainframe computers. However, from its inception, it was often associated with non-communicative activities, largely because of the limitations of networks until recent years. There were other limitations, as Jarvis and Krashen (2014: 1) state in a recent article: When the term CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning) was introduced in the 1960s, the language education profession knew only about language learning, not language acquisition, and we assumed the computer’s primary contribution to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) were programs based on traditional language learning.

Much of early CALL centered around locally-installed software programs that offered primarily activities in which the learner consumed language, but did not produce it, typically: grammar drills, listening activities, or reading comprehension tasks. When the Internet became more widely used on home computers, rather than in classrooms or workplaces, web-based activities appeared. However, these often mimicked the activities that were found in the local software programs. One of the most popular early English language learning websites was Dave’s ESL Café (http://www.eslcafe. com/), which still exists, and is still popular (though one might argue more as a job site than for language learning. Such is the way of the today’s world.). The language activities there still imitate the “grammar workbook” style of learning English, with grammar lessons followed by quizzes of the following style (see Figure 2.1):

20 

 What Constitutes an Effective Language MOOC?

Figure 2.1: Preposition quiz (Source: http://www.eslcafe.com/quiz/prep1.html)

In fact, it was not until the widespread implementation of Web 2.0 technologies, or more specifically, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, in addition with a vast availability of online resources, that the possibility of online language learning that involved meaningful communication was even possible.

2.2.2 The Opportunity for an LMOOC Given the strengths and weaknesses of both cMOOCs and xMOOCs, as well as the nature of language learning that makes it different from learning physics or statistics, for example, it may be time to add another node to the MOOC taxonomy: that of the LMOOC, or Language MOOC. The LMOOC, in imitating the best practices of language teaching and learning, is an eclectic mix of practices and tools aiming to engage students in the use of the target language in meaningful and authentic ways. The next section addresses the characteristics of an ideal LMOOC.

2.3 Making the Massive Human(e) “In the future there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it.” – David Byrne



Making the Massive Human(e) 

 21

About the MOOC I designed and teach, Principles of Written English (College Writing 2x, BerkeleyX, averaging approximately 50,000 participants per five-week segment of the course), a student recently tweeted (see Figure 2.2):

Figure 2.2: Student tweet about course enrollment

Participants are often surprised, in fact, to find out the large number of enrollments in a MOOC, whether it’s an xMOOC or a cMOOC. I was similarly surprised. I had feared that as many as 10,000 would ultimately enroll; my fear was amplified when I saw that 10,000 enrolled the day that registration opened. One of the goals in a Language MOOC has to be to make that number manageable, even irrelevant, to the task of learning. The proposal here for a model for an LMOOC comes largely from this experience in developing, designing, and teaching a MOOC for English language learners. It comes from some of its successes, but mostly from its many lessons learned. Some of the suggestions pertain to platform features that should be developed if LMOOCs are going to be implemented successfully, leveraging the techniques of language teaching and learning we know to be successful.

2.3.1 Engagement and Interaction As mentioned, one of the cornerstones of communicative language teaching, as well as a feature of cMOOCs is a high level of engagement and interaction. In Language MOOCs, it is important that the engagement and interaction take the form of authentic communication, primarily among students. While self-check activities, such as quizzes or short-text entry can be used for students to confirm their understanding of basic concepts, most would agree that the goal of language learning is “[k]nowing how to maintain communication despite having limitations in one’s language knowledge” (Richards, 2006, p. 3). In xMOOCs of today, communication takes place primarily through threaded discussion platforms. Unfortunately, these platforms often fall short in their ease of use and performance. As McGuire (2013: 31) states: Most MOOC discussion forums have dozens of indistinguishable threads and offer no way to link between related topics or to other discussions outside the platform. Often, they can’t easily be sorted by topic, keyword, or author. As a result, conversations have little chance of picking up steam, and community is more often stifled than encouraged.

22 

 What Constitutes an Effective Language MOOC?

cMOOCs, on the other hand, tend to leverage existing social media sites or find ways of connecting for discussion. Mackness (2013) states, “ Participants are encouraged to meet in locations of their choosing and organise themselves”. The different ways of organizing discussion between cMOOCs and xMOOCs is a critical one, and I would argue that neither is perfect. The architectural issues with centralized discussion areas are a legitimate concern. Relying on current social media is also concerning. Using Facebook or Twitter, for example, leaves out students in certain geographic areas due to government restrictions, or leaves out students with concerns about privacy issues with those platforms. However, discussion is the heart of a Language MOOC. The most important work goes on there, whether it’s discussing a reading, sharing writing, or testing out a grammar point. What should discussion look like in an LMOOC?

2.3.2 Student Self-Organization in LMOOCs One trend I noticed in College Writing 2x was for students to self-organize in discussion groups outside of the edX.org platform. In other words, there was a natural trend towards something that looked more like a cMOOC approach to discussion. However, their reliance on established social media platforms (primarily Facebook) meant that only a fraction of students could participate there.

2.3.3 Instructor Presence Another issue that has arisen is the desire for the instructor to be more visible in discussions. In a study of instructor involvement in a MOOC, Tomkin and Charlevoix write of a study they did of one MOOC: The active involvement of the professor did not matter in this MOOC. This course was carefully constructed, and the participants were highly-educated and motivated by a strong interest in the material. As it is likely that the students in many MOOCs fit this description, it is reasonable to suppose that this result holds generally for MOOCs offered today. (2014, p. 76)

I would argue that for LMOOCs, however, instructor presence is important (though perhaps not necessary) to help build community. Kop (2011) explains: [T]here are some other conditions that clearly encouraged people’s involvement and engagement in learning in a connectivist learning environment, including the “social presence” of the facilitators and of participants, which enhanced the “community” forming and the sense of belonging that built confidence and stimulated active participation.



Making the Massive Human(e) 

 23

However, given the structure of both social media and centralized discussion areas of xMOOCs, the presence of the instructor or of designated facilitators may go unnoticed.

2.3.4 An LMOOC Structure for Engagement Because LMOOCs rely heavily on discussion as part of the learning, a different way to facilitate online discussion should be built. This platform should allow for selforganization, by allowing users to create user groups and follow selected colleagues’ posts (think of Facebook friend lists or Twitter followers). As learning another language entails more than learning to write in that language, it should allow for voice/ video posts as well. In order to build stronger bonds, and create a sense of instructor presence, this platform should allow for users to see when instructors and facilitators are online and available for contact. Kop points out: “[T]he closer the ties between the people involved, the higher the level of presence and the higher the level of engagement in the learning activity” (Kop, 2011).

2.3.5 Talking Heads — Good Music, Bad Video Instructional style in most xMOOCs rely on video lectures, typically short ones. I admit when I was first approached about teaching a MOOC, my first resistance was in creating video lectures. (I do not lecture in my face-to-face classes, so why would I lecture online?) Apart from a few notable TED videos, my own attention for online lectures is short. I could not imagine MOOC participants’ attention being any different. Guo, Kim, and Rubin (2014) state it succinctly: [T]o maximize student engagement, instructors must plan their lessons specifically for an online video format. Presentation styles that have worked well for centuries in traditional in-person lectures do not necessarily make for effective online educational videos.

It is clear that almost no one can learn a language well by listening to others explaining it. LMOOC videos can be engaging, but only by leveraging the idea of realia, objects and material from everyday life used as teaching aids, or even better, virtual realia, “digitized objects and items from the target culture which are brought into the classroom as examples or aids and used to stimulate spoken or written language production” (Smith, 1997).

24 

 What Constitutes an Effective Language MOOC?

2.3.6 LMOOC Approach for Video Engagement LMOOCs should expand the idea of what video can be. There are many models of excellent use of video in language learning, from the U.S. public television’s “French in Action” (WGBH, 1987), a story-based approach to authentic language learning, to Michael Marzio’s person-on-the-street-style video-clips and lessons on http://www. real-english.com/. LMOOC instructors and producers should avoid talking head videos, and immerse the participant in a rich environment that will encourage reflection and discussion.

2.3.7 Forms of Assessment In an educational environment that is often assessment-driven, it is not surprising that xMOOCs, whose model can be seen as the more traditional approach, incorporate quizzes and other types of assessment into the architecture. cMOOCs adopt a different tactic, as described by Crowley: In xMOOCs, learners complete assessments (quizzes or peer-reviewed assignments) that evaluate their comprehension of a topic as it is understood from the instructor’s view. In cMOOCs, learners share their insights as they go through the knowledge-building process (e.g., via status updates or blog posts) and self-assess their learning paths. (2013, p. 2)

The question of what needs to be assessed, how often, and by whom remains an item of debate in LMOOCs. However, given that some instructors, as well as students, want or expect assessment, what kinds of assessment make sense in an LMOOC? For MOOCs that utilize open-ended responses, such as essays or short-answer quizzes, or spoken/video responses, assessment is difficult. There are three models for assessment that are commonly used: self-assessment, peer-assessment, and machine-assessment (for written work). The third of these is in its infancy, and the results are questionable (cf. Deane, 2013), so it will not be considered here.

2.3.7.1 Peer-Assessment Peer grading often entails training participants, using a rubric developed by the instructor, to read each other’s work and assess it on a number of points. Given the large number of students in a MOOC, this is often seen as the only viable method: As MOOCs become more widespread, the need for reliable grading and feedback for open ended assignments becomes ever more critical. The most scalable solution that has been shown to be effective is peer grading. (Piech et al., 2013).



Making the Massive Human(e) 

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However, peer grading comes with an assortment of issues. Even with training, some students are not prepared or willing to provide useful feedback to others. Many students see peer-feedback as unhelpful, and sometimes hurtful. In language learning, the different levels of proficiency may also affect a participant’s ability to assess language that is at a higher level of proficiency. Finally, there is also evidence that national bias exists when peer grading, with students assessing work of peers from their own countries higher than work from other countries (Kulkarni, et al., 2013).

2.3.7.2 LMOOCs and Assessment While many are working at improving the peer-assessment processes (cf. Piech et al., 2013), structured self-assessment may provide a better path in an LMOOC. A self-assessment instrument can be created by a course designer alone, or in tandem with beta-testers or participants. (An example self-assessment rubric is found in the Appendix.) Kulkarni et al., citing the work of several researchers, explain that selfassessment “helps students reflect on gaps in their understanding, making them more resourceful, confident, and higher achievers…and provides learning gains not seen with external evaluation” (2013, p. 3). On the other hand, informal peer-feedback, that is, seeking feedback through discussion, can offer more meaningful commentary, since it is voluntary, and not part of a larger, mandatory assessment scheme. In a voluntary system, students choose which items to give feedback one, presumably based on their interest and level of expertise they feel in giving feedback. If assessment is to be used in an LMOOC, a system that offers a combination of auto-scored multiple-choice or text-input items, in tandem with self-evaluation, and an effective discussion mechanism (see section above) may be the most satisfying for participants.

2.3.8 My MOOC is Bigger than your MOOC In the face-to-face world of education, few of us would ever be boast about having large classes. In fact, it is usually with satisfaction that we are assigned the small seminar, the limited enrollment writing class, the 15-person language course. But the acronym MOOC begins with massive, and there is a degree of success that is associated with large enrollments. One criticism of MOOCs on the most prominent platforms has been that they are driven by superstar professors (Glader, 2012) striving for huge enrollments.

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 What Constitutes an Effective Language MOOC?

2.3.8.1 Conflating Numbers with Success When I was beginning my MOOC, I was asked by one of its co-sponsors, the US Department of State, how I would define success. Normally in a face-to-face course, success is defined externally by the university as achieving certain passing marks, or by me as the instructor, as feeling that students have understood most of the course material in a meaningful way, or by the students themselves, feeling that they have learned something of use to them in their future. However, there is a tendency to equate popularity with success. Kulkarni et al., warn against the dangers of confusing high enrollment numbers with “success”: Typing one’s email address into a webpage is not the same as showing up for the first day of a registrar enrolled class. It’s more like peeking through the window, and what the large number of signups tell us is that lots of people are curious. How can we convert this curiosity into meaningful learning opportunities for more students? (2013, p. 25)

For a MOOC, given the large numbers – however real they may be – success has to be driven by students themselves. As no student is compelled to sign up, attend, or even participate in any way in a MOOC, our usual ways of measuring success have to be questioned.

2.3.8.2 There are No Dropouts Here A related concern for MOOCs has been the so-called dropout rates, as reported here: Coursera, and other MOOC providers like Edx, have been seeing massive drop-out rates to go along with their massive enrollment. The New York Times reported that of the 154,763 students who registered for MITx’s circuits and electronics course only 7,157, or 4.6%, passed and less than 50% of registered students made it to the first problem set. (Wukman, 2012)

However, given the nature of enrollments as stated previously, and the fact that there is nothing to compel anyone to start, continue, or complete a MOOC, many have started to question the concept of ‘drop-out’ in a MOOC. As Devlin (2013) writes, “[A] pplying the traditional metrics of higher education to MOOCs is entirely misleading. MOOCs are a very different kind of educational package, and they need different metrics — metrics that we do not yet know how to construct”.

2.3.9 Defining Success in an LMOOC As Devlin (2013) also points out, “MOOCs mean so many different things to so many different people, only time will tell which sections of society they most serve.” We know this to be the case for language learning as well. Students may decide to learn a language in order to achieve minimal competence for an upcoming holiday, or to

Conclusion 

 27

communicate with friends and relatives in another language, or to learn it well enough to read works of literature, or to pursue a degree in higher education. In answering the question about how I will define success in my MOOC, I have to defer the questions to the participants themselves. Given that students join MOOCs for very different reasons, definitions of success will vary accordingly. For the student who has external motivation, for example, learning specific vocabulary or structures to communicate while traveling, success will be measured in achieving those goals. For students who wish to pursue higher education, success may be dependent on goals that are more than language learning itself; they may also involve the learning of proper tone or style for academic discourse.

2.4 Conclusion “MOOCs, regardless of underlying ideology, are essentially a platform” – George Siemens, 2012

In examining the differences between xMOOCs and cMOOCs, the idea that Language MOOCs might require a platform with characteristics that are particular to the subject matter has emerged. This platform needs a richer, more nuanced set of communication tools suitable for the task of language learning; use of instructional videos that present examples of the language and culture of study without resorting merely to expository lectures on linguistic structures; and assessment tools that are sensitive to the range of abilities and goals of students. Until such a platform emerges for language instruction, those of us who design and teach LMOOCs will need to look at the tools available and determine how best to leverage them to meet our goals. The organization of these MOOCs may look like cMOOCs, or like xMOOCs, but in the end the platform may be less important than the goals and planning of those who design the MOOCs themselves. Given that LMOOCs are in the first few days of their infancy, it is critical to pause and consider carefully the learning experience we want to offer to participants. As language educators, we are aware of the complex task that teaching and learning a language entail. If we merely transfer the type of instruction found in any languagelearning textbook, or in the early attempts at CALL, to the MOOC platform, we cannot be said to be transforming language instruction—instead, we are merely retyping it.

2.4.1 Summary: Tips for a Successful LMOOC To summarize the points made in this chapter, instructors and designers who are developing LMOOCs should consider the following suggestions: 1. Maximize engagement and interaction

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

 What Constitutes an Effective Language MOOC?

Consider the ways in which students can participate on the MOOC platform. Students will be more engaged in using language if they can communicate among themselves. The focus of learning should be in interaction, and not just in absorbing course materials. Facilitate, but do not manage, self-organized learning Suggest ways that students might self-organize through social media or face-toface meetings when possible, but do not manage these groups. Students will, in fact, most likely organize these groups without instructor participation at all. Create an instructor presence Students need to know that there is a human instructor participating in the LMOOC. Take time to comment on student discussions in the MOOC, make regular announcements, create a Facebook page or Twitter feed to support the class, etc. Use video for engagement Think about video as a source of authentic language materials, not just as a way to deliver a lecture. Use video as an opportunity for students to become engaged in culture as well as the language itself. Define success As you develop a Language MOOC, think about what success will mean in the course. Encourage students to think of their own goals, and how they will use the course to achieve them. Match the goals of assessment with its form As you think about the goals of the course, consider what type of assessment matches those goals. If the course focus is on writing, for example, then assessment types should evaluate writing in a meaningful way, such as through peer and self-assessment, rather than through multiple-choice questions.

Bibliography and Webliography Brennan, K. (2013). In Connectivism, no one can hear you scream: A guide to understanding the MOOC novice. Retrieved April 9, 2014, from the Hybrid Pedagogy Web site: http://www. hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/in-connectivism-no-one-can-hear-you-scream-a-guide-to-understanding-the-mooc-novice/ Byrne, D. (2007). In the future. The knee plays. New York: Nonesuch Records. Capretz, P. (1987). French in action. Boston, MA: WGBH Public Television. Caulfield, M. (2013). xMOOC communities should learn from cMOOCs. Retrieved April 1, 2014, from the Educause Web site: http://www.educause.edu/Blogs/Mcaulfield/Xmooc-CommunitiesShould-Learn-Cmoocs Crowley, J. (2013). cMOOCs: Putting collaboration first. Campus Technology. Retrieved March 19, 2014 from the Campus Technology Web site: http://campustechnology.com/ Articles/2013/08/15/cMOOCs-Putting-Collaboration-First.aspx Daniel, J. (2012). Making sense of MOOCs: Musings in a maze of myth, paradox and possibility. Retrieved March 9, 2014, from the Journal of Interactive Media in Education Web site: http://jime.open.ac.uk/2012/18 Deane, P. (2013). On the relationship between automated essay scoring and modern views of the writing construct. Assessing Writing, 18(1), 7-24.



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Devlin, K. (2013). MOOCs and the myths of dropout rates and certification. Retrieved January 8, 2014, from the Huffington Post Web site:. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-keith-devlin/ moocs-and-the-myths-of-dr_b_2785808.html Jarvis, H., & Krashen, S. (2014). Is CALL obsolete? Language acquisition and language learning revisited in a Digital Age. TESL-EJ 17(4). Retrieved February 28, 2014, from the TESL-EJ Web site: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume17/ej68/ej68a1/ Jordan, K. (2013). xMOOC? cMOOC? EDCMOOC – e-learning & digital cultures. Retrieved April 19, 2014, from the MOOCMoocher Web site: http://moocmoocher.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/ xmooc-cmooc-edcmooc-e-learning-digital-cultures/ Kop, R. (2011). The challenges to Connectivist learning on open online networks: Learning experiences during a Massive Open Online Course. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12.3.Retrieved April 15, 2013, from the National Research Canada Web site: http://nparc.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/npsi/ctrl?action=rtdoc&an=18150443 Kulkarni, C., Wei, K.P., Le, H., Chia, D., Papadopoulos, K., Cheng, J., Koller, D., & Klemmer, S.R. (2013). Peer and self assessment in massive online classes. ACM Transactions on ComputerHuman Interaction, 9(4), Article 39. Retrieved April 9, 2014, from the Stanford University HCI Group Web site: http://hci.stanford.edu/publications/2013/Kulkarni-peerassessment.pdf Levy, M. (1997). CALL: Context and conceptualisation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mackness, J. (2013). cMOOCs and xMOOCs – key differences. Retrieved April 9, 2013, from the Jenny Mackness Web site: http://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/cmoocs-and-xmoocskey-differences/ Marques, J. (2013). A short history of MOOCs and distance learning. Retrieved April 14, 2014, from the MOOC News and Reviews Web site: http://moocnewsandreviews.com/a-short-history-ofmoocs-and-distance-learning/ Marzio, M. (n.d.). Real English. http://www.real-english.com/ McGuire, R. (2013). Building a sense of community in MOOCs. Campus Technology, August, 31-33. Retrieved April 2, 2014, from the Campus Technology Web site: http://campustechnology.com/ Articles/2013/09/03/Building-a-Sense-of-Community-in-MOOCs.aspx/ Piech, C., Chuang, D., Huang, J. Ng, A., Cheng, Z., Koller, D. (2013). Tuned models of peer assessment in MOOCs. Retrieved January 19, 2014 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.2579.pdf. Richards, J.C. (2006). Communicative language teaching today. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Romeo, K. (2012). Language learning MOOCs? Retrieved April 1, 2014, from the Stanford University Web site: https://www.stanford.edu/group/ats/cgi-bin/hivetalkin/?p=3011 Schmidt, R., Boraie, D., & Kassabgy, O. (1996). Foreign language motivation: Internal structure and external connections. In R. Oxford (Ed.), Language learning motivation: Pathways to the new century. (Technical Report #11). (pp. 9–70). Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center. Siemens, G. (2012). MOOCs are really a platform. Retrieved January 4, 2014 from the eLearnspace Web site: http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/ Smith, B. (1997). Virtual realia. The Internet TESL Journal, III(7). Retrieved April 20, 2014, from the iTESLJ Web site: http://iteslj.org/Articles/Smith-Realia Stevens, V. (2013). What’s with the MOOCs? TESL – EJ: The Electronic Journal for English as a Second Language, 16 (4), 1-14. Retrieved March 1, 2013, from the TESL-EJ Web site: http://www.tesl-ej. org/wordpress/issues/volume16/ej64/ej64int/ Tomkin, J.H., & Charlevoix, D. (2014). Do professors matter? Using an a/b test to evaluate the impact of instructor involvement on MOOC student outcomes. Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale conference, 71-78. Retrieved April 19, 2014, from the ACM Digital LibraryWeb site: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2570000/2566245/p71-tomkin.pdf

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WGBH Boston (1987). French in action. Retrieved April 14, 2014, from the WGBH Web site: http:// main.wgbh.org/wgbh/learn/instructional/french.html Wukman, A. (2012). Coursera battered with accusations of plagiarism and high drop-out rates. Online Colleges. Retrieved January 4, 2014, from the Online Colleges Web site: http://www. onlinecolleges.net/2012/08/22/coursera-battered-with-accusations-of-plagiarism-and-highdrop-out-rates/

Appendix 

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Appendix Rubric for Self-assessment of Writing Select the criteria you feel best represents this submission in each category. Thesis 0 points: I still don’t understand how to write a good thesis. 1 point: I’m not confident about my thesis at all, but I tried. 2 points: I think my thesis is okay, but I am concerned I don’t have a strong argument. 3 points: I wrote a strong thesis I can identify and a main idea that others might have different opinions about. Content 0 points: I didn’t know how to support my ideas. 1 point: I wasn’t always sure how to supply support for ideas, but I think some of it is okay. I need to review that course material again. 2 points: I support most of my ideas, but it seems some of them might just be personal opinion. 3 points: I support my ideas with clear facts and ideas in each paragraph. I can identify my examples easily. Organization 0 points: I wasn’t sure how to organize it. I don’t think it’s organized at all. 1 point: I’m worried that my ideas might seem random and unconnected to each other. I need to work on this more, but I tried. 2 points: I tried to organize my ideas logically. I used signposts and transitions, but there are probably some problems. 3 points: I outlined my work and I’m confident that it has a clear and logical organization, using correct transitions. Vocabulary 0 points: I’m not sure how to do better on vocabulary. 1 point: I didn’t take the time to look up my vocabulary, and there might be a lot of misused words. 2 points: I wasn’t sure about a few words, but overall, I think it’s accurate. 3 points: I am confident that my vocabulary is effective and accurate.

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 Appendix

Grammar and Punctuation 0 points: My grammar needs a lot of work! 1 point: I am still working on my grammar, but I made efforts to do well. There are probably a lot of mistakes. 2 points: I think I did a good job on grammar and punctuation, but there might be more than a few mistakes. 3 points: I used a grammar checker online or in my word-processing system, and asked someone else to read it. I’m sure it’s nearly perfect in grammar and punctuation.

António Moreira Teixeira, José Mota

3 A Proposal for the Methodological Design of Collaborative Language MOOCs Abstract: The introduction of massive open online education has offered a new

range of exciting possibilities for the development of language learning. By opening up access to language education for all who are digitally connected, it contributes to increase the speed and outreach of the dissemination of one of the key transversal competences. Additionally, it allows also for the acceleration of the language learning processes through the use of very large communities of practice. However, most of the MOOCs in offer today are not designed in such a way as to empower learners and favour collaborative learning experiences. In this chapter we explore how the massive open education movement has been evolving and discuss what the design elements favouring massive collaborative language learning experiences should be. We present a methodological proposal for collaborative language MOOCs based on the iMOOC model, developed by a team of the Open University of Portugal (Universidade Aberta – UAb.pt).

Keywords: language learning, massive collaborative learning, open education, MOOC, iMOOC

3.1 The Rise of Digital Massive Open Education 3.1.1 The MOOC Phenomenon: between Large-Scale Content Distribution and Massive Collaborative Learning The pedagogical principles and practices followed by connectivist Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and by those offered through Udacity, Coursera or edX are quite different (Daniel, 2012; Siemens, 2012; Watters, 2012). So different, in fact, that using the same name to designate them may be confusing (Hill, 2012). Downes proposed a useful distinction, calling the former cMOOCs and the latter xMOOCs (Watters, 2012), which has since been widely adopted. The first MOOC bearing that designation was offered by George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier at the University of Manitoba, Canada, in 2008 (Downes, 2012; Daniel, 2012; Watters, 2012). The “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge” course (CCK08) set itself in the larger context of Open Education and Open Educational Resources (OERs), following a practice of sharing with the world the results of regular academic work. © 2014 António Moreira Teixeira, José Mota This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License

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 A Proposal for the Methodological Design of Collaborative Language MOOCs

CCK08 was designed according to the connectivist principles of learning (Downes, 2012; Siemens, 2012; Cormier, 2010), based on a participatory pedagogy and on networked learning. There was not a fixed body of content to be learned, ‘professors’ teaching ‘students’ or a single location where the course took place. Content resulted from the production of artefacts by participants, following their interaction with and their reflection upon a given set of resources (and other resources shared by them or by others), as well as the dialogue among participants around these artefacts; the organizers acted more as facilitators and providers of some necessary structure, with the ‘teaching’ role being assigned to the learning community itself; and, while there was a course site, with the relevant information (weekly topics, list of suggested resources, synchronous session schedule, etc.) and Moodle forums where people could interact, the conversation was distributed by the participants’ own spaces (mostly individual blogs) and several social spaces (Twitter, Facebook, Second Life, etc.). Contrary to common belief, MOOCs were not the creation of a number of high profile professors (Sebastian Thrun, Peter Norvig, Daphne Koller or Andrew Ng) from Stanford University, in 2011. Neither were these personalities “online learning pioneers”, as some uniformed writers state. In fact, their approach to MOOCs was quite distant from the original concept, following closely the model of formal higher education (lectures, assignments, assessment) and adopting a relatively limited understanding of what “open” means in this context. However, they were undoubtedly responsible for setting in motion what would become the educational phenomenon of 2012 (Daniel, 2012). In fact, because of their reputation and the media coverage they received, the discussion about online learning was brought to centre stage. They helped popularize a new idea of how to offer “education” at a massive scale, which can be seen as a positive contribution. Thrun, the major figure in this movement, has since then become disenchanted with MOOCs, announcing that Udacity would abandon them and focus on corporate training, because he felt “[w]e were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don’t educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product” (Chafkin, 2013). Coursera, on the other hand, is still going strong. Despite the recent announcement by co-founder Ng that he would be stepping down from an active role (Ng, 2014), the company claimed impressive numbers in November, 2013, in a post titled “A Triple Milestone: 107 Partners, 532 Courses, 5.2 Million Students and Counting!” (Coursera blog, 2013). The downside to this success, however, is that they disseminated a model for MOOCs that dilutes much of the transformative and innovative potential that the initial concept carried, by ignoring not only the previous work done in the field of Open Education in general, and of MOOCs in particular, but also the bulk of more than 20 years of research and practice in online learning. Consequently, most people in academia as well as the public in general see MOOCs as a synonym for “teaching classes online to a high number of students”, without a sound understanding of how the notions of “open” and “massive” were the real change operators in the



The Rise of Digital Massive Open Education 

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initial concept, or of the history and practice of distance and online education. Furthermore, as universities became interested in MOOCs, the “x” model seemed right. After all, given its characteristics, universities can claim to be innovating while, at the same time, not changing much of their culture and pedagogical practices. Recent developments, such as small private online courses (SPOCs), represent at best this misconception. MOOCs are a developing field, with a great deal of experimentation going on and many relevant questions still to be answered (Watters, 2012). Completion rates are low in all of them (Jordan, 2013; Daniel, 2012; Hill, 2012; Holton, 2012) and problems related with participants’ satisfaction, learning support, technological environment and the quality of the learning experience are yet to be fully addressed (Daniel, 2012; Holton, 2012; Kop, Fournier & Mak, 2011; Siemens, 2010). From our perspective, however, MOOCs should be seen as non-formal online learning experiences and, therefore, clearly differentiated from the typical formal educational offerings.

3.1.2 The iMOOC Approach: a Possible Synthesis? The introduction of MOOCs in higher education institutions poses an important challenge: how to combine typical non-formal learning experiences with a formal education setting? One solution is to use a model which basically replicates an instructional approach. A more innovative perspective is to find a synthesis that articulates the potential of the networked learning approach with the structure of higher education pedagogy. In our view, this can best be exemplified in the iMOOC model which we developed at Universidade Aberta (UAb.pt). This was the first known institutional model specifically designed for open courses, in particular MOOCs. It was conceived to be compatible with the university’s learning culture by building upon the four main pillars of its Pedagogical Model: learner-centredness, flexibility, interaction and digital inclusion (Pereira, Mendes, Morgado, Amante, & Bidarra, 2008). Our goal was to combine autonomous and self-directed learning with a strong social dimension and the interaction that make learning experiences richer and more rewarding. We also wanted to articulate the flexibility that distance online learners need, especially adults with demanding professional and personal lives, with the pacing necessary to help them get things done. We sought to make learning available to as many people as possible, but also to bring these people into the digital online environment, where a crucial part of modern life happens, thus helping curb the digital divide. The model draws mostly on cMOOCs but incorporates elements from other existing approaches, adding some relevant aspects that derive from our experience with online learning and its integration in the larger context of UAb.pt’s Pedagogical Model, as well as the work that has been done regarding Open Educational Resources

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 A Proposal for the Methodological Design of Collaborative Language MOOCs

(OERs) and Open Educational Practices (OEPs). The most important principles are those described in the next paragraphs. Courses are open to everyone who wants to participate. Registration is required for publishing in the institutional spaces but all content is open access, i.e. anyone can read it. The first week of the course is meant for participants to get acquainted with the spaces, tools and services, as well as with the processes of work and communication that will be used in the course. This “familiarization” process, a sort of “boot camp” week, already present in UAb.pt’s Pedagogical Model as a stand-alone module that all students have to take when they start their learning at UAb.pt, has proved to be an essential component in student success and satisfaction regarding their online learning experience. Resources provided as a starting point for the realization of the activities are licensed as OERs or freely available on the Internet. Content produced by participants is licensed according to the individual preference of the authors. The iMOOC is learner-centred and learning is based on the realization of activities. It should be evidenced through the creation of artefacts (texts, videos, presentations, slidecasts, mind maps, mash-ups, etc.) that demonstrate the learner’s knowledge and competencies regarding the material studied. These artefacts are published online. The learning process combines autonomous self-study and reflection with interaction with other participants in an open social context. Participants are expected to take an active role and be responsible for their own learning, but also to actively engage in helping build a supporting learning community. There should be a central place for the course – this could be a website (webpage, wiki, blog, etc.), or an LMS (Moodle, for example), etc. where all relevant information is provided (content, resources, schedule, instructions, etc.) – but most of the work and interaction should benefit from a networked learning perspective, whereby students use their own Personal Learning Environments (PLE) to manage their learning, publish their artefacts and engage in conversation with other participants. Where it seems more adequate, an institutionally supported PLE may be used, i.e. a platform that emulates the experience of using a PLE by offering several Web 2.0 tools and a social networked environment but in an integrated platform supported by the institution. Individual support or tutoring is impossible in a massive course. While there should be suggested activities and guidance from the course organizers, these can be carried out only at a more general level. Learning support has to rest in the learning community, through collaboration, dialogue, peer feedback and active engagement from participants in the learning process. A small team of collaborators can be used to support the implementation of the course – gathering relevant information to be used to monitor and perfect the ongoing process, serving as community facilitators, monitoring social or information networks for course related content, elaborating weekly summaries, etc. This may prove very helpful for the professor or professors leading the course to plan their intervention where necessary.



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Formative assessment can take the form of self-correction tests and also of peer feedback regarding the artefacts produced in the learning activities. Other strategies can be used to provide feedback of participants’ activity – different recommender systems or badges for the completion of tasks or for relevant contributions to the community are two possible examples. Graded assessments are included for participants who want to receive a certificate of completion of the course. In this case, at least two of the artefacts produced as evidence of learning by participants will be assessed and graded through a peer-review system – those who wish to participate in the peerreview assessment will grade the artefacts produced by three other participants and have their artefact graded by three other participants. The final grade will be the average obtained in the three grades given. E-portfolios can also be used for grading purposes wherever they are considered adequate. The assessment follows the same peer-review procedure. Every assessment will be based on a detailed rubric provided by the professor or professors leading the course. MOOCs in the pedagogical model described, following the current terminology, are therefore labelled iMOOCs, given their focus on individual responsibility, interaction, interpersonal relationships, innovation and inclusion.

3.2 Massive Language Education 3.2.1 The Importance of Competence-Based Learning for Language Education in a 21st Century Setting The rise of open education is also linked with the promotion of competency-based approaches in education. In fact, this new approach holds significant potential as learning opportunities can be developed outside classrooms, without following rigid pre-determined curricula. This has widened participation in the education system by many socially challenged groups, such as mature learners, and basically has contributed to open up education not only to all citizens, but also to allow for different social, geographical or time circumstances. By competence, we mean the proven ability to use knowledge, skills and personal, social and/or methodological abilities in work or study situations and in professional and personal development (European Communities, 2008). The implementation of competence-based learning (CbL) has, therefore, led to a shift in focus from a teacher-centred perspective of the educational process to a new student-centred one, stressing the importance of what students need to know and be able to do in varied and complex situations. CbL is therefore focused on outcomes (competencies) that are linked to workforce needs, as well as social needs. The outcomes of a competencebased approach are by definition complex and subject to change.

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 A Proposal for the Methodological Design of Collaborative Language MOOCs

In view of this, CbL methodologies require more sophisticated assessment systems, involving portfolios, experiential learning assessment in field experience, demonstration in diversified contexts, role play, use of standardized learning models, etc. Large skill sets are broken down into competencies, which may have sequential levels of mastery. Competencies reinforce one another from basic to advanced, as the learning progresses. Competencies within different contexts may require different bundles of skills, knowledge and attitudes. The challenge is to determine which competencies can be bundled together to provide the optimal grouping for performing tasks required. Another challenge is to design learning experiences that support students as they practice using and applying these competencies in different contexts. CbL should be used in conjunction with the creation of meaningful opportunities for learners and professional practice in learning environments where they can develop integrated, performance-oriented capabilities for handling the core problems in real contexts. Figure 3.1 below attempts to capture some of the core elements that differentiate traditional learning and competence-based, 21st century learning. Competence-based, 21st century learning

Traditional learning

• • • • • • • • • • •

• • • • • • • • •

• •

Learner-centred Personalized Flexible Social/collaborative nature Challenging “Messy” Contextual Real life like, authentic “Gamified” Questioning/creating knowledge Experimenting; mistakes as learning opportunities Problem solving Artefacts/complex objects/eportfolios

•

Content-centred Uniform Rigid Highly structured Centralized Competitive nature Academic, curricular Memorizing/reproducing information Mistakes as failure; fear of experimenting outside the given parameters Tests / Exams

Figure 3.1: Elements that differentiate traditional learning and competence-based learning

When we look at the language-learning field today, there is a great diversity of conceptual and pedagogical approaches that translate into very different methodologies used. From traditional drill-and-practice, grammar-based learning, to the notionalfunctional structuring of a syllabus, from more cognitive stances to sociocultural perspectives, focused on communicative skills and real interactions in context, they all coexist in current practices, very often mashed-up by teachers who alternate the different approaches in their work with the students. In a recent study, Myles (2013) analysed the major theoretical families in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research



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and found “a plethora of different and seemingly conflicting claims” (2013: 46), concluding that, because of the complexity of language and language learning, it was unfeasible to agree upon a single SLA theory. The fact is that there has never been an authoritative study that could prove, beyond assumptions and based on hard data, the superiority of a method or approach over the others. However, if we move past language learning in abstract and frame it within the context of 21st century learning, then we may start to identify which of these approaches are more fit and have greater potential. In a globalized, technologically connected world, “the focus in language education (…) is no longer on grammar, memorization and learning from rote, but rather using language and cultural knowledge as a means to communicate and connect to others around the globe.” (Sarah E. Eaton, 2013). This entails a learner and community/networked centred approach that values learner autonomy and collaborative learning, on the one hand (Jacobs & Farrell, 2001, see Eaton, 2013; MLTASA, n.d.) and, on the other hand, a focus on knowledge creation and application, whereby learners demonstrate their understanding, reflection and competences through different types of artefacts that they share publicly and which foster dialogue, contrasting perspectives and critical thinking (Eaton, 2013; MLTASA, n.d.). People are increasingly exposed to a greater cultural and linguistic diversity due to the abundance of information present in the media and made available by technological advances. At the same time, the world has become more interdependent and connected, and the opportunities and desire for communicating and collaborating with people in other countries, or for spending some time there, be it for educational, working, voluntary action or leisurely purposes have never been so high. Competence-based, 21st century language learning provides not only a better understanding of the world and a deeper cultural awareness, but also empowers learners with much needed communication and interaction capabilities.

3.2.2 Some Challenges in Designing Language Learning MOOCs Whereas a decade or so ago learning languages online could be a difficult challenge to overcome, technological development and the abundance of resources, either open licensed or freely available online, have minimized such difficulties. Online learning has, from its inception, adopted mostly a social constructivist, collaborative approach. From the first experiences with discussion forums to concepts like the “5 Stage Model” (Salmon, 2000) or the “Community of Inquiry” (Garrison & Anderson, 2003), online learning approaches have always valued autonomy, learner-centredness, critical thinking, dialogue and interaction, and learning in a social context. More recent learning theories in this field, like Connectivism (Siemens, 2005; Downes, 2005), have

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looked at how people learn in a highly digital, connected environment, and expanded these principles to community and networked learning settings. To that extent, one could say that pedagogical approaches to online learning are very competence-based and incorporate many of the key aspects generally included in 21st century learning skills. The real challenges in designing MOOCs come from the “massive” nature of these courses, and language learning poses some specific challenges of its own: the need for small group oral interactions or the tradition of learning by levels are two of the elements that present a higher degree of difficulty. The massive number of participants forces the design of strategies that can promote small group interaction for oral practice–Skype, Google Hangouts, or similar services are effective, but how to organize the formation of groups in a universe that can reach tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of participants? Automatically formed groups are a possibility, albeit a technically demanding one. However, given the different patterns in access frequency, pace in the performance of tasks and dropout rate known in MOOCs, many participants may find themselves in empty or greatly reduced groups, and without an easy path to move on to another functional group. Self-organized groups may be a good idea, but how can one support the creation of these groups by participants? A less rich, but still viable alternative, could be tasks built around audio production and exchanges, either in the form of a podcast, “discussion”, “comments” or “debate”, to give some examples. Furthermore, the presumable heterogeneity of the learning community when it comes to language knowledge and skills will require a choice of whether to organize the course by common reference levels (Council of Europe, 2001); to offer the course only for a specific level; or to allow for a mixed, multi-level environment, which will imply the design of a diversity of paths and tasks that can foster learning at different levels of difficulty and complexity. Ultimately, organizing a language learning MOOC will require some complex decisions to be made, including the willingness to take some risks and experiment with strategies that have not been tested yet and may or may not work as intended. There are no recipes or safe practices in an emerging field where much of the knowledge is being drawn from experimenting, analysing, adjusting and iterating.

3.2.3 Designing Collaborative Language MOOCs Based on the iMOOC Approach In the past, distance education found some solutions that proved to be effective in dealing with very large numbers of students, but they are not adequate for the kind of learning approach we have described earlier. When we look at the current MOOC landscape, the more dominant xMOOC model may be effective for some more conventional language learning approaches, but it does not seem fit for language learning in a 21st century context as we have characterized it before.



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On the other hand, cMOOCs have a great potential in terms of the core principles of this approach. In the case of language MOOCs, however, participants at a lower level in terms of their current language skills may face an additional hurdle in being able to orientate themselves in a very distributed, networked environment. The heterogeneity of learners and of their competences, wider than what can generally be observed in other fields or contexts, calls for a more scaffolded approach, where participants have a better, more structured support for their learning. The iMOOC pedagogical approach can be most appropriate for designing collaborative language MOOCs. In fact, by focusing on the empowerment of the learners not just in an autonomous way but as part of a learning community, the iMOOC model meets the basic requirements of language learning massive courses. Our methodological proposal is, therefore, based on the iMOOC model, which will be explained in the following sections.

3.2.3.1 Technological Environment A Learning Management System (LMS) should be used to centralize the main information regarding contents, resources, suggested activities, schedule, learning guide, relevant course announcements, etc. It should also harbour the discussion forums, one of the places where participants can interact and debate relevant aspects of course content and activity. Examples of this type of system include Moodle (free, open source) and Blackboard (proprietary, but with free hosting at https://www. coursesites.com/), among others. Many institutions will already have some type of LMS that can be used for this. Instead of relying on the participants’ PLEs for the social, collaborative context, we suggest the use of Elgg (http://elgg.org/), a free, open source social networking platform that has great potential to be used as an institutionally supported PLE. It has a variety of web 2.0 tools and social networking functionalities, such as rich profiles, microblogging, blogs, social bookmarking, photo and video publishing, recommender system, wiki-like pages, etc., with the advantage of providing these tools and services in an integrated, user-friendly platform supported by the institution. There should be a single sign-on system implemented between Elgg and the institutional LMS, and the two platforms should be further integrated by allowing students to access content in the LMS from within Elgg.

3.2.3.2 Course Duration The course should run for about six or seven weeks, which seems an adequate length according to some empirical data (Weller, 2013). The first week should be dedicated to the familiarization process – a sort of “boot camp” to get participants acquainted and familiar with the environment, technologies and processes to be used throughout the course. This is a key phase in the process and may contribute significantly to a

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better retention rate, not only because it gives participants enough time to become sufficiently proficient to be able to work and communicate online before starting to engage with course contents, but also because it fosters the development of the learning community that is paramount in this approach. The remaining weeks should be organized around topics, with a short (5 to 10 minute) introductory video for each topic.

3.2.3.3 Learning Process Ideally, in the week prior to the course (or during the first week, if that’s not possible) participants should take a placement test with automatic results to check their language level. This will serve as a guide for them even if the course is not clearly organized by levels. Learning should be based on the realization of tasks. In this model, participants are expected to study independently, exploring the resources, searching and exploring other relevant material on their own, doing the activities and reflecting on their learning experience, and producing artefacts that demonstrate their understanding of the topics and their competences in applying that knowledge. They are also expected to engage in the interaction with other participants and to take an active role in the dialogue around the topics being dealt with, contributing in relevant ways to the creation of knowledge in a shared, social context. They are responsible for their own learning and for helping shape a dynamic, supporting learning community as well.

3.2.3.4 Teacher’s Role Teacher presence and workload have to be carefully considered. Learning support cannot be assured through direct and ongoing teacher intervention. It has to rest in the documentation and resources provided, in strategically scheduled communications from the teacher and in an active and engaged learning community. Teacher/ teaching presence is created through the learning guide, the detailed instructions for the tasks, the introductory videos for each topic and a weekly feedback message, based on the information prepared by the support team. One or two synchronous sessions (Google Hangout, web conference, etc.) during the course (third and fifth week, for example), preferably with one or several relevant guests, should be used to increase teacher/teaching presence, strengthen the social ties in the learning community and serve as “magnets” for retention.

3.2.3.5 Support Team A small team of volunteers should be recruited in order to collaborate with the teacher leading the course. This support team will gather information that may be relevant to monitor course progress and substantiate the teacher’s weekly feedback, act as



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“community facilitators” and help out in setting and deploying the synchronous sessions, polls, peer assessment and other tasks considered necessary.

3.2.3.6 Resources Resources must be provided – mostly OERs available that meet the course needs, or resources produced by the institution and published with an open license, coupled with other material that is freely available online – as a starting point to support the activities designed, but participants should also contribute with other resources that they search and share. The artefacts produced and published by participants throughout the learning process also become part of the course materials, i.e. they are available for other participants to learn from them. Participants should be encouraged to publish these resources as OERs, but ultimately it is up to them to make that decision.

3.2.3.7 Activities/Tasks A variety of suggested tasks should be made available, supporting and scaffolding participants’ exploration, reflection, production and dialogue. As far as possible, these tasks should be authentic, i.e. emulating or mobilizing real life settings, flexible and open ended, which means participants should ideally have a fair amount of choice concerning the process of performing the task and its output – the artefact they will produce. Tasks should also be designed in such a way that they can be performed at different levels of difficulty or complexity, to account for the expected broad spectrum in participants’ language skills. If it seems more appropriate, tasks can be organized by level, using the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2001). In this case, instead of one single task, there can be different versions of the same task, one for each level covered. In any case, smaller self-generated “by level” communities can be formed around these tasks, in which people collaborate more systematically for certain purposes, while maintaining connections and interacting in the wider community/network.

3.2.3.8 Bank of Challenges A “bank of challenges”, much in the spirit of DS1063 “bank of assignments” can be used to complement the regular tasks, allowing participants to do more and explore other types of activities if they wish to do so. The fulfilment of these challenges may be rewarded with badges, thus allowing for them to be included in the participants’ e-portfolio and subsequently used for certification or formal accreditation purposes.

3  Digital Storytelling–DS106–is an open, online course offered at the University of Mary Washington – http://ds106.us/

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Following the same principle as the tasks designed, these could be offered in a single version or organized using the same level system, although many of them could be transversal to all levels, and differentiated in terms of the output through badges that specify different levels of accomplishment. This greatly improves flexibility regarding participants’ opportunities to experiment with different types of tasks and different levels of complexity at their choice in a playful manner. Suggestions for challenges can be contributed by participants and those reaching a defined point of agreement by the community – either using polls or other voting systems – should be included in the bank.

3.2.3.9 Oral Practice A good part of oral practice can be covered in the tasks suggested or in the bank of challenges through the use of recorded audio, shared either as a simple audio file, as a video of the participant speaking, as a narrated video or presentation, or as a regular podcast that participants need to maintain throughout the course, using a free podcast hosting service, and in which they have to publish a defined number of “instalments” (4, for example). Applications like VoiceThread (https://voicethread. com/), for instance, can also be used to foster oral communication and practice. The harder part in a MOOC, as previously stated, is to provide opportunities for real time (synchronous) oral interaction in a small group of, let’s say, 6 to 10 people, who can then use Skype, Google Hangouts or similar applications to have regular conversations, either at their own will or included in the tasks suggested. Here a choice needs to be made on how to organize these groups, but there needs to be a ‘plan B’ in place in case the adopted strategy fails completely. Groups present some difficult challenges, both technically and organizationally, at a massive scale, and it is important that course organizers are prepared to overcome problems if they arise. There are at least 3 possible options, and certainly course organizers may think of others: 1. Auto-generated groups – when participants access the LMS, they are automatically assigned to a group (this may pose the problems mentioned before). 2. There are no pre-arranged groupings and participants enrol in a group up to a certain number, after which the group accepts no more members. This seems more flexible, since people can move to another group that still has vacancies if their group becomes non-functional. Groups can be identified by level, so, again, it is a more flexible solution, since people can choose a level they feel comfortable to interact orally. 3. Self-organized groups – this seems a good solution, as participants can cluster together in small groups that they themselves organize, and is more “organic”, i.e. more similar to the way people self-organize in networks and communities.



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The downside is that many participants, for a variety of reasons, might be unable to join a group or attract other people to their group.

3.2.3.10 Feedback Formative assessment with self-correction should be made available (through tests, quizzes, etc.), but participants must also be encouraged and are expected to discuss and give feedback to one another throughout the learning activities. A regular, more general feedback on the work done each week should be provided by the teacher, based on the information prepared by the support team.

3.2.3.11 Certificate of Completion In our proposal, participants who wish to receive a certificate of completion will have to present an e-portfolio containing a relevant sample of their work in the course, which will be assessed by peers. This e-portfolio should include at least two of the artefacts produced, the badges collected (from completing challenges, for example) and other relevant contributions (other publications not included in the tasks). A qualitative scale can be used for grading: A) Very good B) Good C) Fair D) Fail. Those who wish to participate in the peer-assessment process will grade the e-portfolios produced by 3 other participants. Each e-portfolio will be graded by three different participants. The final grade will be the average obtained in the 3 grades received. This assessment will be based on a detailed rubric provided by the professor or professors leading the course.

3.2.3.12 Formal Accreditation We believe participants should be able to obtain formal credits for their work in the course, for a fee. This will provide a seamless and articulated path from non-formal learning experiences to formal education. Those credits can be awarded following an evaluation by a professor or tutor of the e-portfolio presented by the participants (50%), combined with a final, face to face exam (50%) that must test all 4 skills.

3.3 Final Remarks MOOCs offer a new range of exciting possibilities for the development of language education, since they allow for the creation of very large communities of practice, this feature being a critical element in a successful language learning experience. However, most current pedagogical approaches used in MOOCs do not empower learners and/or favour collaborative learning experiences. In this chapter we demonstrate how a synthesis between a networked learning or connectivist approach and

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a more structured one is possible and can lead to a much more effective language teaching and learning methodology. We have highlighted the main features of the iMOOC Pedagogical Model developed at UAb.pt, which we believe represents at best that synergy, and explored how it can be used to develop successful collaborative language MOOCs.

Bibliography and Webliography Chafkin, M. (2013, November 14). Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course. Fast Company. Retrieved from http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/ udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb. Cormier, D. [dave cormier]. (2010, December 8). What is a MOOC? [Video file]. Retrieved from http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW3gMGqcZQc. Cormier, D. (2008, October 2). The CCK08 MOOC – Connectivism course, 1/4 way [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/10/02/the-cck08-mooc-connectivismcourse-14-way/. Council of Europe (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coursera Blog (2013, October 23). A Triple Milestone: 107 Partners, 532 Courses, 5.2 Million Students and Counting! [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://blog.coursera.org/post/64907189712/a-triplemilestone-107-partners-532-courses-5-2 Daniel, J. (2012). Making Sense of MOOCs: Musings in a Maze of Myth, Paradox and Possibility. Journal Of Interactive Media In Education, 3(0). http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/ view/2012-18. Downes, S. (2012, January 6). Creating the Connectivist Course. [Blog post]. Retrieved from http:// halfanhour.blogspot.pt/2012/01/creating-connectivist-course.html. Downes, S. (2005, December 12). An Introduction to Connective Knowledge. Stephen’s Web. Retrieved from http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=33034. Eaton, S. E. (2010). Global Trends in Language Learning in the Twenty-first Century. Calgary: Onate Press. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED510276.pdf. Garrison, R., & Anderson, T. (2003). E-Learning in the 21st Century: A Framework for Research and Practice. London & New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Hill, P. (2012, July 24). Four Barriers that MOOCs must overcome to build a sustainable model [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://mfeldstein.com/four-barriers-that-moocs-must-overcome-tobecome-sustainable-model. Holton, D. (2012, May 4). What’s the “problem” with MOOCs? [Blog post]. Retrieved from http:// edtechdev.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/whats-the-problem-with-moocs. Jordan, K. (2013, February 13). Synthesising MOOC completion rates [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://moocmoocher.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/synthesising-mooc-completion-rates. Kop, R., Fournier, H., & Mak, J. (2011). A pedagogy of abundance or a pedagogy to support human beings? Participant support on massive open online courses. The International Review Of Research In Open And Distance Learning, 12(7), 74-93. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/ index.php/ irrodl/ article/view/1041/2025. Modern Language Teachers Association of South Australia [MLTASA] (n.d.). A rationale for language learning in the 21st century. Retrieved from http://mltasa.asn.au/a-rationale-for-languagelearning-in-the-21st-century/. Myles, F. (2013). Theoretical Approaches. In J. Herschensohn & M. Young-Scholten, Martha (Eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (pp. 46-70). Cambridge: CUP.



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Ng, A. (2014, May 16). A personal message from Co-founder Andrew Ng [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://blog.coursera.org/post/85921942887/a-personal-message-from-co-founder-andrew-ng. Pereira, A., Mendes, A. Q., Morgado, L., Amante, L., & Bidarra, J. (2008). Universidade Aberta’s pedagogical model for distance education: a university for the future. Lisbon: Universidade Aberta. Available at https://repositorioaberto.uab.pt/handle/10400.2/2388. Salmon, G. (2000). E-Moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online. London: Kogan Page. Siemens, G. (2012, June 3). What is the theory that underpins our moocs? [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/06/03/what-is-the-theory-that-underpins-our-moocs/. Siemens, G. (2010. December 19). What’s wrong with (M)OOCs? [Blog post]. Retrieved from http:// www.elearnspace.org/blog/2010/12/19/whats-wrong-with-moocs. Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2 (1). Retrieved from http://www.itdl.org/ Journal/Jan_05/article01.htm. Teixeira, A., & Mota, J. (2013). Innovation and Openness through MOOCs: Universidade Aberta’s Pedagogic Model for Non-formal Online Courses. Proceedings of the EDEN 2013 Annual Conference (pp. 479-488). Teixeira, A., & Mota, J. (n.d.). iMOOC Model. Retrieved from http://imooc.uab.pt/model_en. Watters, A. (2012, December 3). Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: MOOCs. Hack Education. Retrieved from http://hackeducation.com/2012/12/03/top-ed-tech-trends-of-2012-moocs. Weller, M. (2013, December 12). Completion data for MOOCs [Blog post]. Retrieved from http:// nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2013/12/completion-data-for-moocs.html.

Tita Beaven, Tatiana Codreanu, Alix Creuzé

4 Motivation in a Language MOOC: Issues for Course Designers Abstract: Whilst several existing studies on foreign language learning have explored motivation in more traditional settings (Dörnyei, 2003), this paper presents one of the first studies on the motivation of participants in a MOOC. The MOOC, Travailler en français (https://sites.google.com/site/mooctravaillerenfrancais/home), was a 5-week open online course for learners of French at level B1 of the CEFR, and aimed to develop language and employability skills for working in a francophone country. It took place in early 2014 and attracted more than 1000 participants. Intrinsic motivation (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000) is directly linked to one’s enjoyment of accomplishing a task. We conducted a study based on the cognitive variables of the Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985), and adapted the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory to the context of a MOOC in order to understand the expectancy beliefs and task values of participants engaging with the MOOC. Participants answered a 40 Likert-type questions on enjoyment/ interest (i.e. I will enjoy doing this MOOC very much), perceived competence (i.e. I think I will be able to perform successfully in the MOOC), effort (i.e. I will put a lot of effort in this MOOC), value/usefulness (i.e. I think that doing this MOOC will be useful for developing my skills), felt pressure and tension (i.e. I think I might feel pressured while doing the MOOC) and relatedness (i.e. I think I will feel like I can really trust the other participants). Results highlight significant factors that could directly influence intrinsic motivation for learning in a MOOC environment. The chapter makes recommendations for LMOOC designers based on the emerging profile of MOOC participants, on their motivation and self-determination, as well as on the pressures they might feel, including time pressures. Finally, the extent to which participants relate to each other, and are able to engage in social learning and interaction, is a real challenge for LMOOC designers. Keywords: LMOOC, motivation, self-determination, enjoyment, competence, usefulness, pressure, relatedness

4.1 Introduction Although the term MOOC was coined in 2008, MOOCs emerged into the mass media in 2011, and The New York Times heralded 2012 as the Year of the MOOC (Pappano, © 2014 Tita Beaven, Tatiana Codreanu, Alix Creuzé This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License

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2012). MOOCS have been hailed in the press as democratising education, offering free learning or affordable education for all, especially from top-ranking universities; whilst there was mention of some of the problems, such as the high drop-out rates of MOOCS, up to 2013 much of the media reporting was positive (Haggard, 2013). Although it has been generally acknowledged that MOOCs provide access to education on a massive, international scale (Educause, 2012), it is only in the last year or so that an understanding is beginning to emerge of who exactly the MOOC participants benefiting from this education bonanza are. Christensen et al. (2013) conducted research on students enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania’s 32 MOOCs offered on the Coursera platform, and concluded that students tended to be young, well educated, in employment, and mainly originate from developed countries. De Boer et al.’s (2013) investigation of a single MOOC, MITx 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics, which had more than 150,000 students, also concluded that, whilst students came from a wide variety of geographical backgrounds, most had a graduate or postgraduate qualification. In his comparative study of c-MOOC and x-MOOC participants, Rodriguez (2012) also reported that they were mostly well-educated to at least graduate level, and employed. Christensen et al. (2013) explained that the students’ main reasons for taking a MOOC were advancing in their current job and satisfying curiosity, something which has also been corroborated by De Boer et al. (2013), who cite personal challenge and employment/job advancement opportunities as the two main reasons cited for participating in their MOOC. So, whilst MOOCs might have been seen as opening up education, some exploding of the MOOC myths are beginning to be heard. Laurillard (2014), for instance, argues that the idea that some content is “free” does not mean that it does not have to be curated – and that comes at a cost; she also argues that MOOCs will not solve the problems of expensive university education in the West, or educational scarcity in emerging countries, which she exposes as a “cruel myth” precisely because of the profile of a typical MOOC learner that is beginning to emerge. So far, little research has been conducted into the profile of participants specifically in language MOOCs, with perhaps the notable exception of Bárcena et al. (2014). Their 2013 Professional English MOOC, the first language MOOC in Spain, attracted students that were geographically and linguistically fairly homogenous (mostly from Spain and Latin America) and well-educated (half of the participants were university graduates, nearly a quarter of them were undergraduates and almost 10% were postgraduate students). Nearly half of the participants were aged between 36 and 45 years, and 61% were female. In terms of English language ability, the authors explain that “they all had to take a diagnostic test at the beginning of the course and they were in the bracket of A2+ / B1 according to the Common European Framework of Reference” (Council of Europe, 2001). The participants in another notable LMOOC, Fernando Rubio’s Improving your Spanish Pronunciation, also had a similar profile:

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well-educated to graduate level or above, and overwhelmingly doing the MOOC for personal interest (Rubio, 2014). In the scant LMOOC literature, some difficulties around creating and running language MOOCs and some recommendations for LMOOC designers are beginning to emerge. For instance, Bárcena et al. (2014) report on challenges such as “the change of role of teachers […] away from being an instructor, how to provide effective feedback with such an unbalanced teacher-student ratio, the sheer heterogeneity of the group and the difficulties of the individual evaluation of language communicative competences.” (Bárcena et al., 2014, p. 12). Perifanou and Economides (2014b) have surveyed and classified language MOOCS using the MOILLE (Massive, Open Interactive Language Learning Environment) framework, which evaluated LMOOCs against six dimensions: content, pedagogy, assessment, community, technical infrastructure and financial issues. Some of the issues they highlight are the fact that a high level of interaction is difficult to achieve, that it is difficult to engage in social learning of language skills, that there is a substantial time cost for educators, and that LMOOCs, like other MOOCs, have big drop-out rates. One of their key recommendations is that course designers should try to “keep high students’ degree of motivation and selfdirection” (Perifanou & Economides, 2014a). In this chapter, we want to consider some of the aspects highlighted above in the context of a specific language MOOC, Travailler en français, which took place in the winter 2014. In our research, we wanted to gain an understanding of the profile of the participants in the MOOC, but also, importantly, of their motivations and of whether the MOOC fulfilled their initial objectives. In that sense, our research relates closely to the agenda set out by Colpaert (2010) in his work on educational engineering as a research method. Colpaert has highlighted the importance of the identification and formulation of personal goals. These can be conceptualised as “design concepts derived from an abstraction of hidden factors that stimulate or hinder a group or subgroups, personas in the learning process. They are not necessarily psychological realities, which would be hard to prove. They are assumptions about some aspects of the user which have appeared to be of decisive importance for the design process.” (Colpaert, 2010, p. 296). This author points to self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2000) autonomy, and relatedness. We discuss the SDT concept of needs as it relates to previous need theories, emphasizing that needs specify the necessary conditions for psychological growth, integrity, and well-being. This concept of needs leads to the hypotheses that different regulatory processes underlying goal pursuits are differentially associated with effective functioning and well-being and also that different goal contents have different relations to the quality of behavior and mental health, specifically because different regulatory processes and different goal contents are associated with differing degrees of need satisfaction. Social contexts and individual differences that support satisfaction of the basic needs facilitate natural growth processes including intrinsically motivated behavior and integration of extrinsic motivations, whereas those that forestall autonomy, competence, or

Introduction 

 51

relatedness are associated with poorer motivation, performance, and well-being. We also discuss the relation of the psychological needs to cultural values, evolutionary processes, and other contemporary motivation theories. Self-determination theory (SDT) which “attempts to explain human choices on the basis of the innate psychological needs for competence, relatedness and autonomy” is one of the theories that is instrumental in situating this approach (Colpaert, 2010, p. 271). As we were setting up the Travailler en français MOOC, there were a number of issues we knew we wanted to be able to understand. These included the profile of our MOOC participants, the use they made of the learning resources and tools we provided – both through the MOOC platform and through the social media tools (Facebook and Twitter), their intrinsic motivation at the start of the MOOC, and their engagement with and feedback on the activities on a week by week basis. Additionally, our use of social media tools was designed to augment the MOOC. Data from the social media analytics was observed in order to understand how information from MOOC activities disseminates through users of those platforms. We note that users of social media platforms are not all necessarily participants of the MOOC. Like some of the early projects highlighted by Colpaert (2010), we believe some of the early MOOC research, including ours, “suffers from an unfocused approach, which was not yet methodical enough to yield formal and explicit knowledge” (p. 262). This is inevitable in a new and developing area, and is due in part to the experimental nature of many LMOOC initiatives so far, and in part to the tension that often exists between teaching and research interests of staff involved in the design and running of MOOCs. More importantly, it is to do with the transdisciplinary nature of the enquiry (Colpaert, 2004; Nicolescu, 2002). We will return to these issues at the end of the chapter.

4.2 Context: the MOOC Travailler en Français The MOOC Travailler en français was a French language MOOC that ran for 5 weeks in the winter 2014 (with an additional week at the start for participants to get ready, and one at the end for the final evaluation) and was organised by the Instituts Français of Madrid, Milan, London and Bremen, and by the Department of Languages at the UK Open University4. It was aimed at learners of French at a level B1 of the CEFR (Council

4  The Project was coordinated by Alix Creuzé (IF Madrid) and Jérôme Rambert (IF Milan), and the team was made up of colleagues from IF Madrid (Patrick Carle, Sarah Dosch, Pierre Fichet, Audrey Marcouiller, Noemi Mourer), IF Bremen (Béatrice Praetorius, Emmanuelle Serveau), IF London (Sandrine Chein, Tatiana Codreanu, Thierry Gauthier, Gaëlle Robin, Jessica Untereiner) , the Open University (Bill Alder, Tita Beaven, Hélène Pulker, Elodie Vialleton), and Marion Charreau, an independent consultant. 

52 

 Motivation in a Language MOOC: Issues for Course Designers

of Europe, 2001), and focussed on employability skills and, more specifically, on skills related to looking for a job in a French-speaking context. Approximately 1200 participants enrolled in the Travailler en français MOOC, which has been referred to as the first French as a foreign language MOOC (Vaufrey, 2013). The team selected simple tools that were free to the participants, and that enabled them to work on a synchronous and asynchronous basis. The MOOC platform was a Google site and the course made extensive use of Google docs and surveys; the forum was hosted on Weebly, and we used Blackboard Collaborate for synchronous videoconferences. The activities and tasks were based around freely available resources and tools. Different types of MOOCs are driven by different ideologies and pedagogic approaches (Siemens, 2012). Whilst cMOOCs tend to emphasise “creation, creativity, autonomy, and social networked learning” (Siemens, 2012, para. 3), xMOOCs tend to have a more traditional, transmissive, teacher centered approach, where content is often delivered through short video lectures and tested through quizzes. The Travailler en français MOOC was influenced by the principles of both cMOOCs and taskbased MOOCs (Lane, 2012). From a connectivist point of view, the MOOC supported “participatory, distributed, and […] life-long networked learning” (Cormier, 2010b). Although the MOOC platform formed the central spine of the course, both the social networking aspects and the use of distributed resources across the web meant that learning did not “take place in a single environment; instead, knowledge [was] distributed across the Web, and people’s engagement with it constitutes learning” (Kop, 2011). At the same time, the MOOC was also designed around fairly authentic tasks, where participants had to, for instance, take part in a job interview simulation, or undertake an online careers advice test and discuss the outcomes with others in the forum. The “rights” of participants were based on those developed by the organisers of the  ITYPA (Internet,  Tout  Y est  Pour Apprendre) MOOC (http://www.actionsfle. com/?p=822), an innovative French MOOC about tools, methods and strategies to better use the web for learning. The participants’ rights were clearly stated and included the right to not take part, to lurk, skip weeks and not finish the course. The MOOC was structured around five topics: how and where to look for work, the CV, the application letter, getting ready for a job interview, and working in a multicultural team. Each week included a series of specific tasks, although students also made further suggestions about resources or activities, which contributed to making a more dynamic environment. Each week also included two videoconferences, one with a language focus, hosted by a language teacher, and the other centered around the topic of the week, and including the intervention of an expert. Kop et al. (2011) reflect that “different learning objectives and different life contexts of learners in an open course lead to different levels of participation in learning activities and subsequently to different learning outcomes”, and point to “a maturing of eLearning users; the more experience in networked learning and through MOOCs,



Research Methods 

 53

the higher the level of participation”. They distinguish between those that were “confident with the technology and with the topic under discussion” and thus “produced artifacts and created learning networks”, and the “new MOOCers”, where “there was a higher level of consumption of resources created by others.” (Kop et al., 2011, p. 88). In the case of the Travailler en français MOOC, participants were mostly new to MOOCs and had to deal with a triple challenge: working in a foreign language, using or acquiring technical competences, and learning in a new online environment.

4.3 Research Methods For this study, we adopted a mixed methods approach, which has also been used in other MOOC research (Bárcena et al., 2014). We gathered user data from the MOOC platform through Google Analytics, as well as data generated by analytics reports of use generated by Facebook and Twitter. We also included self-evaluation questionnaires at the end of every week to further understand the appraisal participants were making of the MOOC and of their own learning. For this chapter, we have analysed the results of the first self-evaluation questionnaire they completed at the end of week 1, and the last one at the end of week 5, as well as the mid-point one at the end of week 3. The questionnaires included eight statements which students had to agree with on a five-point Likert scale. Four questions were common to all self-evaluation questionnaires and were designed to find out the following: whether participants had experienced any technical difficulties; whether they thought the activities were appropriate for the level of French expected of participants (B1 of the CEFR); whether they had met other participants that shared their interests and with whom they’d been able to interact and collaborate; and whether the week’s activities were useful in terms of helping them fulfil their initial objectives. The other four questions related to the specific knowledge or skills learnt or practiced during each week. In addition, students were asked how long they had spent on the MOOC activities that week. There was also the opportunity to give feedback through an open comment section. When designing the self-evaluation questionnaires, we were concerned that, whilst they would provide some useful feedback on the weeks’ activities, they were not based on a robust theoretical approach. We decided to focus on researching the intrinsic motivation of the MOOC participants in order to answer the following question: What are the intrinsic motivational characteristics that learners demonstrate prior to starting the MOOC and how can course designers adapt their approach to meet these intrinsic motivational characteristics? Studies on motivation have focused mainly on two kinds of approaches: sociopsychological (Gardner & Lambert, 1972) and cognitive (Atkinson, 1957; Bandura, 1997; Deci & Ryan, 1985; Eccles, 1983; Pintrich & Schunk, 1996; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000). The first approach takes into account the instrumental motivation (Gardner & Lambert, 1972). The second approach considers motivation as a dynamic process that

54 

 Motivation in a Language MOOC: Issues for Course Designers

is dependent on multiple factors. Several existing studies on foreign language learning have explored motivation (Dörnyei, 2003; Ohki, Hori, & Nishiyama, 2009). For our study, we decided to conduct an initial survey based on Deci and Ryan’s Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan, 1982), which has been used in a number of experiments relating to intrinsic motivation and self-regulation. Intrinsic motivation (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000), is directly linked to one’s enjoyment of accomplishing a task, and the IMI is designed to assess the participant’s interest/enjoyment, perceived competence, effort, value/usefulness, felt pressure and tension, perceived choice (while performing a specific activity), and relatedness to others. The survey we designed for this study is based on the 45-item “Post-Experimental Intrinsic Motivation Inventory”5, which we adapted to the context of our MOOC. As with other MOOC evaluation and research, we found that there are issues about the open nature of the MOOC that mean there is a decreasing number of participants, and therefore of respondents, as the MOOC progresses. Also, participants had the “right” not to take part in activities they did not want to so, whilst 507 of the approximately 1200 registered participants responded to the IMI (a response of over 40%), only 56 responded to the self-evaluation questionnaire at the end of week 1, 25 to the one at the end of week 3, and 25 to the one in week 5. Moreover, we do not really know whether the participants who responded to the three self-evaluation surveys were the same for all surveys. In spite of these uncertainties and limitations, which we believe are intrinsic to researching open environments such as MOOCs, in the next sections we shall attempt to provide an analysis the data and a discussion of our findings.

4.4 Profile of the Travailler En Français MOOC Participant From the analytics data we know that the main countries of origin of the MOOC participants were Spain (36%), France (23%), Italy (9%) and the UK (5%,) but the MOOC attracted participants from more than 36 countries (including Morocco, Germany, USA, Algeria, Mexico and Greece). In that sense, the MOOC provided participants with an environment in which they could experience first-hand some of the issues about intercultural communication that were discussed in the course; at the same time, we would argue that they needed to already have some degree of intercultural awareness in order to succeed in the MOOC. Indeed, McAuley et al. (2010) remind us that “social competencies and capacity or experience in extending beyond one’s own cultural context” are invaluable in a MOOC that attracts participants from a variety of different countries (McAuley et al., 2010, p. 50).

5  http://www.selfdeterminationtheory.org/questionnaires/10-questionnaires/50



Analytics: Platform Use and Social Media Metrics 

 55

In terms of the background of the participants, we added a number of additional questions to the IMI initial survey to find out more about their profile. Valid answers to those questions (n.507) revealed that nearly half of the participants were employed (35.5%) or self-employed (10.8), and a third (29.5%) were students. Of those that described their area of activity in the same questionnaire (n.349), over a third (36%) were in education and 24% worked in the area of science and technology. The others worked in a range of fields, including health and social areas, tourism, public administration, finance and insurance, leisure and the arts, and legal professions, describing a fairly wide range of professional domains. In terms of their language skills in French, of the 427 respondents to that questions, 200 (46%) rated themselves as having the level the MOOC was aimed at (B1 of the CEFR), and most of the others (41%) had a level above that required, whilst only 11% had a level below B1. In conclusion, the profile of the Travailler en français MOOC participants is quite similar to that of the participants of other LMOOCs: they had a good level of education and were in education or employment at the time of taking part in the MOOC. In addition, they were a fairly international mix, and their linguistic ability in French was at or above that expected by the MOOC designers.

4.5 Analytics: Platform Use and Social Media Metrics The MOOC was supported by social media activity. Content linked to MOOC activities was posted on Facebook and Twitter. Twitter data analysis shows that the content that generated the most user engagement were pictures and content sent during the videoconferences6 (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1: Tweets by content

6  Data gathered through Simply Measured (www.simplymeasured.com)

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 Motivation in a Language MOOC: Issues for Course Designers

Additionally, it was observed that a high percentage of the MOOC content was retweeted through mobile platforms. We set up an API to track how information was disseminated through and between different users7 (Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2: Data visualisation of the Twitter account

Through this approach, we identified 79 users actively interacting (through tweets, mentions and retweets) with the MOOC account. Nodes (indicated by circles in Figure 4.2) represent users who reply to and mention MOOC’s activities. Dotted lines represent mentions of the MOOC and solid lines represent the social conversation between Twitter users about the MOOC. It is possible that users on Twitter and Facebook might have had a positive impact on participants’ further engagement on MOOC’s activities; however, this hypothesis needs to be further explored and goes beyond the purpose of this paper.

7  Data gathered through TAGSExplorer (Martin Hawksey) which uses Google Visulisation API and Twitter Web Intents API to represent relationship between raw data (http://hawksey.info/tagsexplorer/)



Regular Student Self-Evaluation 

 57

Google Analytics data indicated that users accessed at least 12 different pages of the MOOC for an average time of over 4,17 minutes per page during the first weeks of the MOOC, and 3,39 minutes per page during the last week of the MOOC. To what extent this is typical of LMOOCs remains to be evaluated, and the whole area of user experience in LMOOCs is a possible avenue for future research. Further investigation would be needed through user interviews to assess the usefulness of the materials and reasons for demonstrating such usage behaviour and should also focus on usability, accessibility, understandability of information, navigational issues, among other aspects, to identify whether they have an impact on their utilization of the MOOC website. The MOOC generated a large amount of data which provides more opportunities to study user behaviour. As highlighted by Siemens and Long, Big Data and analytics are “the most dramatic factor shaping the future of higher education” (Siemens & Long, 2011, p. 31), indicating their usefulness for the benefit of future MOOCs. This data needs to be analysed through a more scientific approach beyond traditional academic settings, blending rich information gathered through analytics in order to benefit stakeholders (including MOOC designers), giving them insights on how to realize personalized MOOC learning experience. Additional large-scale research could highlight how teachers on a MOOC can make sense of real-data (velocity, volume, variety) surrounding the MOOC and how they can control it to find and share information to build a connected community that benefits their teaching. As we will discuss below, the issue of how to better engage LMOOC participants in social learning and increase the interaction between them is a challenge for LMOOC designers, as reported by Perifanou and Economides (2014b), and a careful use of social media to support networks of learners is an issue for further research and development.

4.6 Regular Student Self-Evaluation As mentioned above, at the end of every week we included a short self-evaluation questionnaire. A summary of the data analysis is included in the three tables below (Tables 4.1-4.3), but we shall focus our discussion on some of the issues that we found most interesting.

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 Motivation in a Language MOOC: Issues for Course Designers

Table 4.1: Self-evaluation questionnaire, week 1 Week 1 (n 56)

Mean

SD

1. I had no technical difficulties this week.

3.803

1.016

2. I found the activities for this week corresponded to the level the MOOC was advertised at, i.e. B1 of the CEFR (intermediate).

3.910

1.116

3. I met people on the MOOC that shared my areas of interest and I was able 2.375 to interact and collaborate with them this week.

1.287

4. During the week I found out about the different stages of a plan of action 3.785 for seeking employment.

0.846

5. I did an online audit of my skills using the Kledou tool, and it was a useful 3.875 experience.

1.176

6. I learnt to use the Eures website to find a job using different criteria

3.535

1.249

7. Thanks to the activities undertaken, I think I know better where and how to look for work in francophone countries.

4.035

0.761

8. I found the suggested activities were useful in helping me fulfil my initial 3.982 objectives.

0.884

Table 4.2: Self-evaluation questionnaire, week 3 Week 3 (n 25)

Mean

SD

1. I had no technical difficulties this week.

3.92

0.862

2. I found the activities for this week corresponded to the level the MOOC was advertised at, i.e. B1 of the CEFR (intermediate).

4.12

0.781

3. I met people on the MOOC that shared my areas of interest and I was able to interact and collaborate with them this week.

2.56

2.56

4. I was able to identify the characteristics of a formal letter.

4.68

0.476

5. I have understood how to write a formal letter in French.

4.48

0.918

6. I have written an letter of application to suit my needs.

3.68

1.375

7. Thanks to the activities undertaken, I think I know better how to adapt to the situation of looking for work in a francophone context.

4.2

0.763

8. I found the suggested activities were useful in helping me fulfil my initial objectives.

4.48

0.714



Regular Student Self-Evaluation 

 59

Table 4.3: Self-evaluation questionnaire, week 5 Week 5 (n 25)

Mean

SD

1. I had no technical difficulties this week.

4.16

1.106

2. I found the activities for this week corresponded to the level the MOOC was advertised at, i.e. B1 of the CEFR (intermediate).

4.52

0.822

3. I met people on the MOOC that shared my areas of interest and I was able to interact and collaborate with them this week.

2.8

1.607

4. During the week I have analysed and understood certain situations of culture shock.

4.16

1.143

5. I have identified certain stereotypes relating to work and nationality.

4.68

0.556

6. I have learnt to use appropriate forms of address in a professional context, 4.2 including the use of tu/vous, and to adapt to different situations depending on the context.

1.040

7. Thanks to the activities undertaken, I think I know better how to adapt 4.32 to a work situation in a multicultural context, and to resolve intercultural problems (openness, respecting others, understanding on one’s own culture, flexibility, adaptability, empathy).

0.945

8. I found the suggested activities were useful in helping me fulfil my initial objectives.

0.7

4.64

In terms of technical problems, as the MOOC progressed, participants’ responses indicated that they had fewer of these. Similarly, as the MOOC went on, participants seemed to be more in agreement with the statement that the activities corresponded to the stated level of the module (B1). Without being able to track the respondents, we can only speculate, but the most likely interpretation is that participants who were experiencing either technical or linguistic difficulties probably dropped out of the MOOC. The third statement, relating to meeting, interacting and collaborating with other participants, is the one that received the lowest level of agreement, although it becomes marginally higher as the MOOC progresses: overall, it seems, however, that participants did not think they had met peers that shared their interests and with whom they could interact and collaborate. Statements 4-7 were specific to the content of each week, but sought to understand how far participants had engaged with the specific activities and content of that week. If grouped together, statements 4-7 achieve the following mean in each week: week 1:3.755, week 3: 4.147 and week 5:4.187. It appears that in weeks 3 and 5 students have engaged more with the activities and content that in week one. It might be that in week one they were still finding their way, or “orienting” (Cormier, 2010a), or again that those that were not engaging with the activities and content of the MOOC simply

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 Motivation in a Language MOOC: Issues for Course Designers

dropped out as the course progressed. In weeks 3 and 5, the activity that gets the lowest agreement, “I have written a letter of application to suit my needs” is also the only one that involved a written production activity typical of the traditional language classroom – one might conclude that this task simply required too much effort for the perceived gain. Finally, as the MOOC progressed, students agreed more with the statement “I found the suggested activities were useful in helping me fulfil my initial objectives”. The issue of cause and effect is one that is not clear from the data and would require further research. As the course progressed, students were finding that the MOOC was better fulfilling their original objectives; whether this was to do with the MOOC design, the students’ intrinsic motivation and self-determination, or simply with the fact that those that did not feel the MOOC was fulfilling their objectives dropped out, is difficult to ascertain without further research.

4.7 Intrinsic Motivation The results for the IMI (Deci & Ryan 2000) obtained through the survey participants did at the start of the MOOC have been summarized in Table 4.4. As we outlined in the methods section, the IMI is designed to assess the participant’s interest/enjoyment (or intrinsic value), perceived competence, effort, value/usefulness (i.e. utility value), felt pressure and tension, perceived choice (while performing a specific activity), and relatedness to others. We decided not to test for perceived choice, as we assumed all participants in the MOOC were there by choice, but included items for all the other variables. We separated perceived competence into perceived competence in ICT and perceived competence in French, as we thought a perceived lack of competence in either of these might be a source of demotivation for participants. In terms of pressure/tension, we similarly included two sub-sections, one on pressure/tension caused by ICT and one caused by French language proficiency, and a further one, on pressure/tension caused by lack of time. An additional question asked participants how long they thought they would spend on the MOOC every week. The scores demonstrate the degree of self-determination and autonomous motivation among students. The resulting values of intrinsic motivation and utility were the highest, with a fairly low standard deviation, showing that respondents were broadly in agreement with each other. Students thought the MOOC would be interesting and enjoyable, and that it would be useful in general as well as in terms of improving or maintaining their level of French and of ICT, and in finding a job in a French-speaking country.



Intrinsic Motivation 

 61

Table 4.4: Summary of results of the initial IMI questionnaire Mean

SD

Intrinsic Value

4.311

0.805

Perceived competence ICT

3.592

1.108

Perceived competence FR

3.562

1.132

Effort

3.867

0.899

Pressure/Tension

2.505

1.105

Pressure/tension FR

2.714

1.313

Pressure/tension ICT

2.393

1.216

Pressure/tension Time

3.312

1.200

Utility value

4.154

0.987

Relatedness

3.162

0.950

Key: Bold indicates standard subscales

Perceived effort also scores fairly highly, and links to the time that participants think they will spend on the MOOC every week, which broadly adds up to between one and four hours. When compared with the estimations of how long participants reported to have spent on the MOOC in the different weeks, it seems that the initial assumptions were broadly correct, although it is noticeable that more people spent less than one hour on the MOOC in weeks 1 and 3 than anticipated (and did they perhaps drop out, as nobody spent less than one hour in week 5?), and more people spent five hours or more, especially in weeks 3 and 5, possibly indicating that, as the MOOC progressed, participants spent longer on it. Another possible explanation is that it is the participants that spent longer on the MOOC that are the ones who finished it, perhaps because they were more committed to the course. The IMI identified three areas of possible pressure/tension: pressure/tension caused by ICT, by French language proficiency, and by lack of time. Although the values are not particularly high, indicating that participants did not feel any particular pressure or tension because of these factors, the value for the perceived pressure/ tension relating to the time they expected to spend on the MOOC scored higher than the other two values (French and ICT skills), so time was the issue that concerned them the most. This is consistent with the IMI results for the perceived effort variable, which scored high, meaning that participants thought the MOOC would require some effort from them. Similarly, it is consistent with the time spent in the MOOC, both as anticipated and as self-reported, and with the fact that the percentage of participants spending five hours or longer on the MOOC increased as the MOOC progressed.

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 Motivation in a Language MOOC: Issues for Course Designers

Table 4.5: Time spent on the MOOC (anticipated and self-reported) How long on average do you intend to spend on the MOOC per week?

IMI (n 428)

W1

W3

W5

Less than an hour

3% (14)

9%

8%

0%

One to two hours

40% (191)

41%

20%

40%

Two to four hours

45% (215)

33%

40%

40%

Five hours or more

13% (62)

16%

20%

20%

Finally, respondents’ expectations on relatedness to the other participants was observed to be moderately high. Relatedness was identified in the IMI with level of trust and feelings of closeness in regards to other MOOC participants. Interestingly, the anticipated relatedness did not seem to materialise in the MOOC, and the lowest scores in the weekly surveys are for agreeing with the statement that participants had met others in the MOOC that shared their interest and with whom they could interact and collaborate. One possible reason for this is to do with the design of the MOOC; with hindsight, we think the forum for interaction between participants was not as well integrated as it is on other MOOC platforms: in the FutureLearn platform (futurelearn.com), for instance, discussion spaces are built seamlessly into the activities, and we speculate that the more seamless and intuitive the spaces for interaction, the more likely it is that interaction will take place.

4.8 Conclusion As teachers running a language MOOC, we were keen to find out about the profile of the MOOC participants, to understand their achievements and satisfaction with the proposed activities, their interaction with the MOOC platform, and with each other, both in the MOOC forum and the videoconferences, and through the social media related to the course. We also wanted to understand how long they actually spent on the MOOC. At the same time, as researchers, we also wanted to set up a firmer research agenda for the Travailler en français MOOC, and wanted to use a solid theoretical framework to find out about the intrinsic motivational characteristics of learners prior to starting the MOOC, as we thought these would give us some pointers in terms of MOOC design. Our recommendations for LMOOC designers, based on the evaluation of the Travailler en français MOOC are as follows. First of all, in the near future, there is no reason to doubt that participants will probably continue to conform to the profile that has started to emerge both in MOOCs in general and in LMOOCs in particular. LMOOC designers can probably assume that participants will be fairly well educated, young, in education or employment,

Conclusion 

 63

and mostly from developed countries. Although we might subscribe to the potential MOOCs have to democratise education, and to the social justice mission they might fulfil, widening participation in MOOCs is still a challenge, as participation in a MOOC makes demands and assumptions of the participants in terms of technical ability and of a degree of familiarity with the subject (in our case a degree of language expertise). Furthermore, as Downes (2012) explains, MOOCs expect that participants “will have learned how to learn […] it isn’t about teaching these skills in a MOOC. Suggesting that this is or ought to be the function of a MOOC is to misunderstand it.” Secondly, because participation in a MOOC is voluntary, LMOOC designers can probably expect their participants to be well-motivated. Ours certainly were, and the results of the IMI questionnaire demonstrated a degree of self-determination and intrinsic motivation. Moreover, as well as believing that the MOOC would be interesting and enjoyable, participants also thought the MOOC would be useful. The selfevaluation questionnaires revealed that those that persevered had, in fact, found it useful. As Downes (2012) explains, this is an intrinsic characteristic of MOOCs: “one big difference between a MOOC and a traditional course is that a MOOC is completely voluntary. You decide that you want to participate, you decide how to participate, then you participate. If you’re not motivated, then you’re not in the MOOC.” As MOOC designers, we are therefore in a rather privileged position of actually producing and running courses for very well motivated learners. However, it is important that we do not underestimate the pressures about which MOOC participants might be concerned. In our MOOC, participants did not feel particular pressure or tension because of the linguistic or technical demands the course might put on them. They were, however, slightly more concerned about time pressure. Whilst their assumptions about how long they might have to spend on the MOOC were broadly correct, it seems that, as the MOOC progressed, fewer participants spent less time on the MOOC, and more participants spent longer. It might be that those that only had a very limited time to spend on the MOOC dropped out, and that the ones that were left were the ones that were more committed to the MOOC, and therefore they spent more time on it. As MOOC designers, we must take into account that participants will be well motivated, but also consider carefully what factors might cause pressure or tension in the MOOC participants, and try, where possible, to mitigate them. We would like to finish this chapter by returning to something we raised in the introduction. As an advocate of Educational Engineering as a research method, Colpaert (2010) explains that both “education in general, and language teaching in particular, will always be amenable to improvement and therefore should always be a process of constant re-engineering, developing new working hypotheses on the basis of practical experience and theory” (Colpaert, 2010, p. 271). In attempting to understand and explain the processes and products of educational endeavours, he points out three of their main features: “transdisciplinarity, slowness and being undervalued”. Colpaert (2004), drawing on Nicolescu (2002), explains that “the design

64 

 References

method as problem-solving technique should draw from the various disciplines involved, such as pedagogy, SLA, linguistics, software engineering, and psychology”. We have certainly found that to be the case in this project, and are convinced that we need transdisciplinary teams to actually tackle some of the complexities involved in both designing MOOCs, and in researching them. Colpaert also explains that as language teachers working with technology, our research is extremely slow: because we research and evaluate real instances of teaching, our real-world lifecycle loops (analysis, design, development, implementation, evaluation) often take one or more years. This, he explains “often conflicts with the increasing pressure to publish, which brings us to the third feature: being undervalued.” (Colpaert, 2010, p. 272). He goes on to advocate that Educational Engineering be recognized as a research method in education. One final recommendation for MOOC designers, therefore, is that they adopt an educational engineering approach to the development and evaluation of their work and embrace the transdisciplinarity and the timeframes needed to make sense of the new phenomenon of LMOOCs. Acknowledgments: The authors wish to express their gratitude to Pr. Dr. Edward L. Deci, Professor of Psychology and Helen F. & Fred H. Gowen Professor in the Social Sciences, Department of Psychology, University of Rochester, for his valuable feedback during the design of the MOOC’s IMI questionnaire.

Bibliography and Webliography Atkinson, J. (1957). Motivational determinants of risk-taking behavior. Psychological Review, 64(6 part 1), 359-372. Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. Worth Publishers. Bárcena, E., Read, T., Martín-Monje, E., & Castrillo, M. D. (2014). Analysing student participation in Foreign Language MOOCs: a case study. In EMOOCs 2014: European MOOCs Stakeholders Summit (pp. 11–17). Retrieved on 1 May 2014 from http://www.emoocs2014.eu/sites/default/ files/Proceedings-Moocs-Summit-2014.pdf Christensen, G., Steinmetz, A., Alcorn, B., Bennett, A., Woods, D., & Emanuel, E. J. (2013). The MOOC Phenomenon: Who Takes Massive Open Online Courses and Why? SSRN Electronic Journal. Colpaert, J. (2004). Editorial: Transdisciplinarity. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 17(5), 459–472. Colpaert, J. (2010). Elicitation of language learners’ personal goals as design concepts. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 4(3), 259–274. Cormier, D. (2010a). Success in a MOOC. Retrieved on 1 May 2014 from http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=r8avYQ5ZqM0 Cormier, D. (2010b). What is a MOOC? Retrieved on 1 May 2014from http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=eW3gMGqcZQc Council of Europe. (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: learning, teaching, assessment. Strasbourg: Language Policy Unit, Council of Europe. Retrieved on 1 May 2014 from http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Source/Framework_EN.pdf DeBoer, J., Stump, G. S., Seaton, D., & Breslow, L. (2013). Diversity in MOOC students’ backgrounds and behaviors in relationship to performance in 6.002 x. In Proceedings of the Sixth Learning



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International Networks Consortium Conference. Retrieved on 1 May 2014 from http://tll.mit. edu/sites/default/files/library/LINC ’13.pdf Deci, E., & Ryan, R. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum. Deci, E., & Ryan, R. (2000). The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. Dörnyei, Z. (2003). Attitudes, Orientations, and Motivations in Language Learning: Advances in Theory, Research, and Applications. Language Learning, 53(S1), 3–32. Downes, S. (2012). What a MOOC does. Retrieved on 1 May 2014from http://www.downes.ca/ post/57728 Eccles, J. (1983). Expectancies values and academic behaviors. In T. Spence (Ed.), Achievement and achievement motivation (pp. 75–146). San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. Educause. (2012). What Campus Leaders Need to Know About MOOCs. Retrieved on 1 May 2014 from http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/what-campus-leaders-need-know-about-moocs Gardner, R. C., & Lambert, W. E. (1972). Attitudes and motivation in second-language learning. Newbury House Publishers. Haggard, S. (2013). The maturing of the MOOC, BIS Research Paper. Retrieved on 1 May 2014 from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/240193/131173-maturing-of-the-mooc.pdf Kop, R. (2011). The challenges to connectivist learning on open online networks: Learning experiences during a massive open online course. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol 12, No 3. Kop, R., Fournier, H., & Mak, J. (2011). A pedagogy of abundance or a pedagogy to support human beings? Participant support on massive open online courses. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol. 12, No. 7. Lane, L. (2012). Three kinds of MOOCs. Retrieved on 1 May 2014 from http://lisahistory.net/ wordpress/2012/08/three-kinds-of-moocs/ Laurillard, D. (2014). Five myths about Moocs. The Times Higher Educational Supplement. Retrieved May 16, 2014, from http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/five-mythsabout-moocs/2010480.article McAuley, A., Stewart, B., Siemens, G., & Cormier, D. (2010). The MOOC Model for Digital Practice. Retrieved on 15 May 2014from https://oerknowledgecloud.org/sites/oerknowledgecloud.org/ files/MOOC_Final_0.pdf Nicolescu, B. (2002). Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (Translated by Karen-Claire Voss). Suny Series in Western Esoteric Traditions. 2002. New York: SUNY Press. New York: SUNY Press. Ohki, M., Hori, S., & Nishiyama, N. (2009). Les causes principales de la baisse de motivation chez les apprenants japonais de français, Revue japonaise de didactique du français, vol. 4, n. 1, Etudes didactiques, pp. 71-88. Pappano, L. (2012). The Year of the MOOC. The New York Times. Retrieved on 14 May 2014 from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-aremultiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html?pagewanted=all Perifanou, M., & Economides, A. (2014a). MOOCS for foreign language learning: an effort to evaluate and explore the first practices (presentation). Retrieved on 1 May 2014 from http://www. slideshare.net/mariaperif/inted14perifanou-economides) Perifanou, M., & Economides, A. (2014b). MOOCS for foreign language learning: an effort to explore and evaluate the first practices. INTED2014 Proceedings, 3561–3570. Pintrich, P., & Schunk, D. (1996). Motivation in education: Theory, research, and applications, Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentice Hall. Rodriguez, C. (2012). MOOCs and the AI-Stanford Like Courses: Two Successful and Distinct Course Formats for Massive Open Online Courses. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning.

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Rubio, F. (2014). Boundless Education: The Case of a Spanish MOOC. FLTMAG. Retrieved on 1 May 2014 from http://fltmag.com/the-case-of-a-spanish-mooc/ Ryan, R. (1982). Control and information in the intrapersonal sphere: An extension of cognitive evaluation theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43(3), 450–461. Ryan, R., & Deci, E. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. The American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. Siemens, G. (2012). MOOCs are really a platform. Blog. Retrieved on 1 May 2014 from http://www. elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/ Siemens, G., & Long, P. (2011). Penetrating the fog: Analytics in learning and education. Educause Review. Retrieved on 1 May 2014 from http://www.elmhurst.edu/~richs/EC/OnlineMaterials/ SPS102/Teaching and Learning/Penetrating the Fog.pdf Vaufrey, C. (2013). “Travailler en français”, le premier MOOC de FLE. Retrieved on 1 May 2014 from http://cursus.edu/article/21244/travailler-francais-premier-mooc-fle/#.UzMK6Kh_tQA Wigfield, A., & Eccles, J. (2000). Expectancy–value theory of achievement motivation. Contemporary Educational Psychology no 25, 68-81.

Mª Dolores Castrillo de Larreta-Azelain

5 Language Teaching in MOOCs: the Integral Role of the Instructor Abstract: Following the outbreak of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in 2012, the roles, competences and methodological strategies of online language teachers are once again called into question, mainly because of the “massive” nature of these courses in which tens of thousands of students may enrol. This work analyses the new teacher profile from a theoretical and practical standpoint, identifying its main roles and competences. Keywords: Language MOOC teaching; MOOC teacher roles, competences, skills

5.1 Introduction The recent emergence and sudden proliferation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) (Baker, 2012; Bershin, 2013) and their more than likely persistence and coexistence with other alternative forms of online teaching (Horizon Report, 2013; Yuan & Powell, 2013) have once again raised an urgent need among all stakeholders to rethink and investigate the role of educational institutions, students and, of course, educators (Glance, Forsey, & and Riley, 2013; Pardos & Schneider 2013). Throughout the last decade, research related to online language teaching and, in particular, that investigating the skills, roles and competences of the foreign language teachers, was finally beginning to bear fruit. As a result, thorough case studies and papers on their roles and competences in virtual environments, either relatively closed (LMS, flipped classrooms, blended learning) or open, based on Web 2.0 collaborative tools (Crompton, 2009) emerged. MOOCs appeared quite disruptively in 2011 (Conole, 2013; Yuan, & Powell 2013) as a new model of online education evolving naturally from the learning based on the social network. Inspired by the initiatives promoted by the Open Educational Resources (Read & Rodrigo, 2014), they provide the best example of collaborative learning based on the connectivist and collective intelligence theories that “focus on the vast informational network that is produced by and further enables the participatory, creative moments of the users of the Web.” (Lévy & Bonomo, 1999, p. 3). I agree with Stickler & Hampel (2007) in that there is little doubt that the success factor in learning a language is directly proportional to the quality of its transmission and hence the qualification of teachers. The disruptive and clearly differentiating feature of MOOCs versus other forms of online teaching is the number of students –in principle, unlimited– that these courses are targeted to. This requires rethinking the © 2014 Mª Dolores Castrillo de Larreta-Azelain This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License

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contents, the methodological strategies for transmission, and –in close relation– the roles of the educators’ teams. It is noteworthy that there is unanimity among the above-mentioned authors when defining the main characteristics that underpin the structure of MOOCs: these courses consist of brief bites of videotaped content, automated correction assessment and feedback questionnaires, peer assessment tasks, and tools for communication and collaborative work, such as discussion forums, blogs and wikis (Glance et al., 2013). The new roles, competences and tasks of the teacher arising from this new open-course format have been insufficiently researched to date. Grounded on the current models and theoretical frameworks on which the profile of the online language teacher holds up (for example, Crompton, 2009; Hampel, 2005; Kessler, 2007; Salmon, 2003), and after a brief review of the parameters and theoretical frameworks supporting it, this paper aims at clarifying the profiles, competences and new roles in the new massive environments for language learning.

5.2 Background: Online Language Teaching With the emergence of the Internet, the social network and the various mobile devices which make it widely accessible, online language learning has increased sharply (Hubbard, 2008; Stickler & Hauck, 2006; White 2003). Despite it being apparent that the new Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) require the urgent definition of a theoretical framework supporting and defining the new roles of the online language teacher, the related bibliography is surprisingly scarce. Most authors agree on ascribing similar competences to face-to-face and online language teachers; however, they also highlight that there are significant differences too in the way knowledge needs to be transmitted so that virtual environments are successful, thus entailing an important adjustment in roles (Stickler & Hampel, 2007; Goodyear, Salmon, Spector, Steeples, & Tickner, 2001). The constructivist nature of learning in virtual environments, arising from student autonomy and the new competences and roles of the teacher, had already been noted in the last century, among others, by Meskill and Ranglova (2000, p. 20): “Teachers guide students to sources, rather than acting as the source […]. The teacher serves as a moderator who guides discussions and provides help when called on to do so.” Furthermore, even before the widespread use of the Internet and the development of pioneering language teaching experiences on the Web, some authors such as Widdowson (1990) had discussed the need to redefine the roles of the foreign language teacher so as to get away from the rigid definitions in place at the time and to enhance the flexibility of their functions, “… such a rigid definition of roles impedes the natural learning process since it does not allow for learner initiatives …” (p.181). This very concept of flexibility and the need to envision different learning styles in Computer Assisted Language Learning (henceforth, CALL) is likewise corroborated in



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2000 by Warschauer & Kern, among others, who claims that language teaching on the Internet must not be based on a single methodological strategy but on “… a constellation of ways...” (Warschauer & Kern, 2000, p.17). Throughout more than a decade, researchers such as Salmon (2003, p.29) have put forth theoretical models for the design and tuition of virtual courses elaborated mainly along constructivist teaching approaches (for example, Jonassen, Collins, Campbell, & Haag , 1995), in which the competences of the educators are profiled and developed in order to fulfil new social and pedagogical roles. In this sense, and after more than a decade, successfully acclaimed implementation of Salmon’s model adapted to German language virtual courses in the scope of formal education within the different levels and degrees at the Spanish National Distance-learning University, UNED, I propose a framework to develop Language MOOCs (hereafter, LMOOCs) that, while originating in said tutoring model, has been further developed to introduce significant changes in how LMOOCs are elaborated and, therefore, requires the redefinition of the competences of the LMOOC teacher. My model links the specific features of LMOOCs to Salmon’s theoretical tutoring model and the new teacher roles. Moreover, I agree with Compton (2014) who, after critical analysis of the bibliography existing to date, similarly proposes an alternative theoretical model for online language teaching, complementary to that of Hampel & Stickler (2005) and, in conclusion, suggesting the need to define three types of categories of basic competences for the online language teacher within the following areas or scopes: technology, pedagogy and evaluation. Hampel and Stickler’s model (2005, p.316) described seven basic skills in a pyramid so that they “build on one another from the most general skills forming a fairly broad base to an apex of individual and personal styles”. Such skills should have to be acquired sequentially, starting at the base of the pyramid. I agree with Crompton’s criticism that students in CALL environments acquire skills concurrently and not sequentially and, furthermore, not necessarily in the order shown in Hampel and Stickler’s pyramid. Crompton’s model is intended to address the limitations implied in the pyramid’s sequencing, but also focuses on the skills of an online language teacher organised into three levels of expertise: novice, proficient and expert. His framework is based on the three major sets of online language teaching: technology, pedagogy and evaluation. Each of these sets have different skills that make up the basis of the new parameters defining the role of the LMOOC teacher, as described in the next section.

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Figure 5.1: Skills pyramid (Hampel & Stickler, 2005, p.317).

5.3 Redefining the Teacher’s Role in Language MOOCs Although the typology of MOOCs has become more diverse and new hybrid modalities have appeared (for example, Clark, 2013) this paper addresses the two original categories. It first deals with cMOOCs (connectivist MOOCs), because of their open and flexible nature and their epistemological foundation based on Connectivism (ZapataRos, 2013), not to mention their exclusively online transmission means. Connectivism has been defined among others by Siemens and Tittenberger (2009, p.11) as “the view that knowledge and cognition are distributed across networks of people and technology and learning is the process of connecting, growing and navigating those networks.” Additionally, I combine constructivist strategies, such as peer-assessment, with features belonging to the xMOOC model, such as the transmission of content via short videos –much closer to Mastery Learning (Bloom, 1968). Without a doubt, we may speak of a new stage in online language teaching outside the classroom whose most surprising feature is perhaps the lack of direct teacher-student interaction (Williams, 2013, p.1). Paradoxically, this seems to tie it back to an early stage based on postal service (or even radio and TV broadcasts), except that in this later stage interactivity is channelled technologically and chiefly among peers, through social networks, forums, etc. Out of the six types of interaction occurring in virtual environments: 1) Learner-Teacher; 2) Learner-Learner; 3) LearnerGuest Expert or Learner-Community Member (Human interactions); 4) Learner-Tools;

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5) Learner-Content; and 6) Learner-Environment (Non-human interactions) (Hanna, 2000, p.11) the first one in order of appearance, and also the most important one up to now (learner-teacher), descends to the last positions with the new MOOC model.

5.3.1 Criticism of G. Salmon’s 5-Step Model: Why it is not Valid for MOOCs The massive nature of MOOCs places a major constraint on the work of the teacher, whose fundamental activity is shifted preferentially to the design of the structure and the development of the course contents, including the recording of short videos as a preferred means of transmission, the design of peer-to-peer (henceforth, P2P) activities, rubrics and self-assessment exercises and the setting up of different communication channels, among other activities. In her model for the creation and tuition of virtual courses, Salmon (2003) distinguished five stages that take place sequentially, entailing different extents of teacher-student interactivity. Although it is beyond discussion that this model –as noted before– has proved very successful in different formative assessments within my experience at UNED of teaching German as a foreign language for over a decade, it only partially applies to LMOOCs in terms of techniques to moderate and enliven the course. It does not apply, however, to the sequencing of stages, and even less so to the degree of interactivity expected from the teacher at each phase.

Figure 5.2: Salmon’s Five Step Model (2003)

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Notwithstanding, these five phases still follow each other in the new LMOOCs environments, albeit with a different sequence and interconnection, as will be discussed in the following section.

5.4 A Proposed Framework for MOOC Language Teaching In order to identify the roles of the language teacher within the new massive virtual environments, I will build partially on the classification of pedagogic roles and competences of university-level educators in ELearning Environments created by Muñoz Carril, González Sanmamed, & Hernández Selés (2013). In Table 5.1 a classification of roles is proposed according to the several stages of the course. Table 5.1: Teacher Roles in Massive Open Online Language Courses Course stage Teacher roles

During

After

MOOC Administrator, manager–Technologist -Researcher

Before

MOOC characteristics

MOOC structure designer-developer/ Organizer

Agenda, timeline

Content expert/ Content creator/ Content facilitator

Short subtitled videos Quizzes Aid and supporting materials

Assessment designer/ Evaluator

Peer- and self-assessment

Communication tools and structure designer

Email, forums, questions and answers tool, blog, wiki.

Facilitators

Facilitating discourse

Curators

Providing direct instruction

Researcher

Learning Analytics



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5.4.1 Before the MOOC: the Teacher as Structure Designer and Content Generator As suggested in the previous section, the main task of LMOOCs’ teacher teams is shifted almost completely to the design and elaboration of the course. As described in the section on course tuition, the participation of the teacher in that phase is not regarded as being strictly necessary, since the tutoring functions have been assigned to the two roles which result from the impossibility for a single teaching team to work with tens of thousands of students, and which are typical of these courses: curators and facilitators, explained further on.

5.4.1.1 MOOC Structure Designer Recent research (Glance et al., 2013) points out that the theoretical framework underpinning the MOOCs’ teaching/learning model is based on “Mastery Learning” (hereafter, ML) as defined by Bloom (1968). The open online format of the MOOCs provides the students with learning strategies based on this model (Koller, 2012). Furthermore, the teaching models derived from ML require a high degree of planning and structuring (López, 2006). Along these lines, for the adequate development and structuring of an agenda, Gentile & Lalley (2003) propose a systematic, sequential plan based on ML, similar to the one which the MOOC educator must lay out for the course’s instructional design. The major goal that the educator must face in such open environments is the creation of a structure, which is also based on the description of competences in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2001), and is at once well-defined and flexible, contemplating different learning styles and scalability. To this end, the following four steps are proposed, based on Gentile & Lalley’s (2003) 13 steps: 1. Divide your course in meaningful units or modules, 1- or 2-week long. According to recent research, the optimal length of MOOCs lies between 6 and 12 weeks. Longer courses have lower engagement and completion rates. 2. Estimate the hours of study for each unit or module. It is preferable to overestimate the number of hours to avoid the feeling of frustration which an underestimate may cause to the student. The average of weekly hours of study in MOOCs lies between 4 and 8. 3. Set a mastery standard for each unit and, depending on that, discriminate among compulsory and optional learning targets by assigning explicitly distinct tasks. The student must be aware at all times of the compulsory or optional nature of each of the tasks. 4. Include a proposed timeline with the sequencing of contents. Past experience seems to advise making the different units or modules incrementally available, and keeping them open and accessible up to the end of the course. In this way, learning along the suggested scheduling is facilitated (‘guide on the side’) while

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flexibility is reinforced by allowing the student to enrol at a later time, to review the contents, to delve into previous units, etc. 5.

Figure 5.3: LMOOC Structure example⁸

5.4.1.2 Content Expert/ Content Creator/ Content Facilitator Once the mastery standard for the contents of each unit is set, the educator can apply heuristic strategies to present and transmit them through short videos. This constitutes an appropriate methodological framework to explain the learning objects at a practical level. Furthermore, this entails providing appropriate aids to our students so that they may become capable of acquiring the scheduled linguistic competence through heuristic strategies such as reasoning by analogy. According to the mathematician Polya (1945), the foundation of this lies in the experience of problem solving and seeing how other people do it. The students of

  “The following video introduces Module 1 ‘Foundations’, which will get us started in the pronunciation and stress of the German language, among other learning objects. The Module is comprised of the following learning pills: […]. In order to work on this Module properly, you must watch all the videos corresponding to the pills, download and study the pdfs associated with each of them, check the supplementary material, and debate in the forums. Also, it is compulsory to do the self-assessment test and we particularly recommend participating in the P2P task of this Module (non-compulsory).”



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these massive courses watch in the videos how the teachers help them solve the problems by applying strategies, methods or criteria which explain the usage of complex structures in a simple way, involving strategies that are generally reliable and efficient rather than “optimal” (Abel, 2003, p.55). Heuristics are closely related to creativity, a feature which is also linked to MOOCs and is proving to be extremely relevant to the transmission of knowledge and the negotiation of meaning in these learning environments. As Anderson and Block (1985) point out, ML provides students with as much time as needed to acquire mastery of a skill. Thus, the use of short videos along with quizzes that provide formative assessment (Glance et al., 2013) seems material for the transmission of knowledge in these open online learning environments. This means of content transmission was adopted by Peter Norwig (2012) in his now famous MOOC on artificial intelligence and is the one generally implemented in all subsequent MOOCs. The short videos resemble individualized tuition and allow students to control the delivery speed by stopping at certain passages, replaying others and reviewing contents. The effectiveness of using video to enhance language learning by providing opportunities for learners to construct and negotiate meaning had already been firmly established prior to the proliferation of these new environments (Chun & Plass, 2000, p. 161). In LMOOCs’ videos it is likewise crucial to provide detailed subtitling enabling the students to follow along with the contents. Subsequent to research such as Talaván’s (2013), the “great possibilities for feedback existing between AVT (audiovisual translation) and language pedagogy, particularly in today’s multi-media, multi-sensorial, multi-methodological, multi-tasking and multi-semiotic society” seem well-established (Talaván, 2013, p.135). The most widely used video channels such as YouTube or Vimeo include advanced automated caption tools to facilitate this task; however, given their relatively poor results, I recommend careful revision. According to Khan (2012), the optimal video length to catch and keep the students’ attention lies in the span of 10 to 15 minutes. My experience shows that video length should not exceed 10 minutes; in longer sequences students claim to get distracted and to perform parallel tasks mechanically and unconsciously (such as opening up new tabs, participating in chats, etc.). This conciseness makes it necessary to choose the contents to be transmitted adequately. In order to make the most of them and to reinforce the retention of the concepts transmitted through the MOOC’s videos, recent research such as that of Williams (2013), prompts the educator to elaborate a set of several questions and issues to be tackled by the student before, during and after viewing the instructional videos. The cognitive benefit rendered through the questions examined prior to viewing would be grounded on the activation of the student’s schemata. Intra-modular questions would lead to reflection on and clarification of concepts and, finally, post-modular ones spaced out through the following modules would help revise and best secure the concepts.

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Yet another of the educator’s competences as content creator is the elaboration of supplementary materials which, on the one hand, help strengthen the knowledge of advanced students and, on the other, facilitate learning language structures to students unfamiliar with online learning. The heterogeneity of the student body in this kind of course requires the design of a scaffolding structure that accounts for the scalability of knowledge. On the other hand, it is the heterogeneity itself of the profiles that makes personalization easier without needing to resort to complex adaptive algorithms. Students access the contents individually through their own device and interface, at their own pace (Schneider, 2013). The relevant fact is that students can “pick and choose” the contents, creating, thus, their own learning path.

5.4.1.3 Assessment Designer/Evaluator The “massive” number of students in LMOOCs makes it impossible for the educator to manually assess the progress in the acquisition of knowledge—individualized feedback by the teacher is altogether out of the picture in this kind of learning environment. To date, there are two modalities of assessment used in LMOOCs: self- and peer-assessment. The effectiveness of the former in online learning environments has already been pointed out by a number of researchers (for example, Garrison, 2003; Taras, 2010). It is advisable that these activities include readily-accessible answer keys. The success of self-assessment tasks depends on the adequate design of tests and other exercises and, above all, on the appropriate automatic feedback previously designed by the teacher. In this kind of course, it is crucial that students obtain effective feedback for both correct answers (for example, drawing relations, analogies, etc.) and incorrect ones (including relevant explanations and examples). As language learning research has shown (see for instance Ellis, 2002), raising language awareness contributes significantly to language learning. Error awareness and correction should prevent the errors from being fossilised and also help “with the de-fossilisation of the already fossilised errors.” (Dodigovic, 2005, p.5). In all cases, explicit reference must be made to the corresponding content in the teaching materials and to the particular sequence where the learning object under assessment is described and explained. Similarly, it is very effective to link the learning objects under assessment to the several threads in the forums, blog or wiki pages of the course where they are discussed. Under the assumption that most students actually enrol in the courses to broaden and strengthen their knowledge and not just for the certification (as shown in recent statistics summarized in the graph below) it seems suitable to set up unlimited access to these self-assessment tests, so that the students have a maximum of opportunities to strengthen and secure their knowledge of the subject matter.



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Figure 5.4: Data related to student’s motivation to enroll in the MOOC “German for Spanish Speakers: Fundamentals” (2014) (Note: responses were not exclusive)

Peer-to-peer activities make up one of the best options for the design of tasks aiming at the development of oral and written skills. Although there are opinions against the effectiveness of this kind of tasks (Sadler and God, 2006; Sluijsmans, Dochy, & Moerkerke, 2004), it seems proven that they enhance students’ cognitive skills deriving from the capacity to analyse and synthesize, to identify problems, and to come up with solutions (Nelson & Schunn, 2009). Some recent research suggests that the results of task revision by four peers would be just as appropriate as those provided by the revision conducted by a single instructor (Patchan, Charney, & Schunn, 2009). To get the right result from these kinds of activities, the educator must incorporate a high degree of flexibility into their design, offering different possibilities to solve them. At this point, it is important to be reminded of the heterogeneity in the profile and background of the students, and the varying extent of their digital literacy, among other factors. The autoethnographic approach to learner experiences in MOOCs of Bentley, Crump, Cuffe, Gniadek, Jamieson, MacNeill, & Mor (2014) has proved highly clarifying in this regard, since it points out the different perception that students themselves have about success in MOOCs, in which they value above all being able to work at their own pace in a non-competitive yet productive way: “Adapting to the connectivist pedagogy of open learning […] had its challenges which I overcame with perseverance, support and luxury of sufficient time.” (Bentley et al., 2014, p.20). When preparing an activity based on, say, an audio or video recording intended to practice pronunciation, we must take into account that the description of the task must be preceded by a detailed explanation of the technical possibilities for such recording: recording software, recommended formats, etc. The technical component must be explicitly mentioned and described. It seems appropriate to classify tasks requiring

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the use of complex tools as optional. A sample description for this kind of task (from the course “German for Spanish Speakers: Fundamentals”9) is given next, illustrating the foregoing: “P2P Tasks (peer-assessment tasks) In some Modules you will also be given the possibility to carry out P2P tasks (tasks where coursemates assess one another). The specific explanation for each P2P task will be given within each available task. As this is quite of a novelty, we detail next how these tasks work, some possible problems and their solutions. To carry out these tasks, you will create a file in your computer in order to upload it to the platform following the directions to be found. Please be reminded that, when prompted, it is also compulsory to write something in the textbox and to attach the file. Following that (usually the day after the file is uploaded), the platform will display your coursemates’ exercises, which you shall review and comment. The assessment consists in reading, listening or watching what your coursemate has written or recorded and in writing a piece of assessment in the textbox with the help of the rubric to be found next to the description of each task.[…]. We discuss here some of the problems which came up in other courses already using these tasks, and some possible troubleshooting: […]Most importantly, do not worry if any problems come up–remember these activities are optional in this course.” (Note back: translated from Spanish)

My voluntary approach to these and other similar activities fits with MOOCs’ connectivist nature and is based on research such as that carried out by Bentley et al. (2014) who conclude that the success rate in online language learning depends on selfconfidence, advancing at your own pace, and finding paths adequate to our learning style. On the other hand, the inclusion of rubrics with assessment criteria based on teaching units which are clear and precise comprises one of the keys to success in the significant achievement of peer review. Table 5.2 shows four basic criteria for rubrics in LMOOCs: Table 5.2: Basic Rubric Criteria in LMOOCs (Adapted from Bárcena et al. 2104) Category

Criteria

Semantic

Appropriateness of vocabulary, terminology and register

Grammatical

Grammatical correctness

Phonological/Phonetic

Fluency, pronunciation and intonation

Pragmatic/Contextual

Intelligibility and coherence

9  The MOOC “Alemán para hispanohablantes: nociones fundamentales” (German for Spanish Speakers: Fundamentals) was developed by the author and went on to win the MECD-Telefónica Learning Services-Universia prize for the best course (2013).



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5.4.1.4 Designing and Structuring Communication Tools According to Andersen (2009), the construction of knowledge only takes place when there is a highly planned communicative structure underlying the learning act. Without the adequate planning of communicative acts, only low-level cognitive interactions are generated. This theory, which applies to all learning modalities, both faceto-face and online, is particularly pertinent in massive online learning environments, where the appropriate design and planning of the MOOC’s communication tools by the educators team is highly relevant. Most MOOC platforms incorporate communication tools such as blogs, wikis and, of course, emails and forums. The first major decision the educator faces when planning the communicative strategies of the MOOC concerns the tools to be implemented and their targets, so that their structure can be subsequently organized. Table 5.3 shows some communication tools and their likely applications in LMOOCs: Table 5.3: Communication tools in LMOOCs and likely applications Type of communication

Tool

Likely applications

Asynchronous

mass mailings

First contacts before starting the course, relevant punctual communication (technical difficulties, possible malfunctions, etc.), encouragement, feedback

Blog

Relevant punctual communication (technical difficulties, possible malfunctions, etc.), encouragement, feedback, other notifications

Wiki

Repository P2P assignments Other collaborative tasks

Online Forums

Direct help with problems, assessment or understanding a concept (Darabi et al., 2011) Social interactions

Webconference

Solving doubts, practice

Chat

Solving doubts, practice

Synchronous

Depending on the technological platform on which the MOOC is implemented, the educator will have available different communication resources which shall be carefully set up prior to beginning the course in order to let communication flow in an organized and structured way, thus enabling students to make progress with their learning smoothly and flexibly by negotiating meaning, providing resources and

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raising questions related to their learning process. Some considerations concerning design and planning with these tools are given next: 1. Assess possible tutoring aids when setting up the tools (availability of curators and/or facilitators, video infrastructure). 2. Assess our own expertise and mastery thereof (setting up all the tools without a proper follow-up does not help improve the course). 3. Synchronous tools in massive environments are hardly ever effective; on the contrary, it is extremely difficult –almost impossible– to originate high-level cognitive interactions through them. 4. Some of the best-documented failures in MOOCs arose from the inclusion of compulsory tasks based on communicative or collaborative tools external to the platform (for example, How NOT to Design a MOOC: The Disaster at Coursera and How to Fix it, 2013). 5. In the design of the forums, the overall aim of the teaching team must be to devise a structure encompassing all kinds of possible issues. Multiple-threaded conversations on a network can be overwhelming to most language learners (for example, Swaffar, 1998). To prevent the c for course from becoming a c for chaos, the educator must design a rigid structure based on categories, subcategories and conversation threads which allows for the logical distribution of topics, as in Figure 5.5:

Figure 5.5: Forum Structure Example

5.4.2 Throughout the MOOC: New Forum Curator and Facilitator Roles Faced with the “massive” number of students in a MOOC, and in order to make tuition feasible, two roles have arisen to support the teacher team in this process who undertake part of their function, while replacing the profiles of “moderator” or “tutor” from closed online environments: the curator and facilitator roles. According to the holistic model (Simpson, 2012, p.15), the former (curator) should provide students with academic support (cognitive, intellectual and knowledge



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issues), whereas the latter (facilitator) offers non-academic support or counselling, and helps students with the emotional and organizational aspects of their studies. The competences associated with the curation of contents in digital environments are linked to the process of searching, organizing, and online publishing of contents in the chaotic and never-ending online world. MOOCs have given rise, on the one hand, to the role of curator as content expert and, on the other, to the facilitator, who takes up the course tutoring more directly (equalling the moderator (Salmon, 2003) of other non-massive, closed online environments). Table 5.4 summarizes the competences and roles of each profile: Table 5.4: New professional roles within MOOCs: curator and facilitator Role

Competences

Curator

Provides direct instruction Solves doubts about teaching materials Suggests additional material to enhance performance Focusses the learners attention on specific issues Supplies summaries on subject matter

Scope

Course Forums

Profile

Mediates among educators Reports on possible errors in subject matter, team and facilitators progress, recurring complaints and possible problems Facilitator

Facilitates discourse

Oversees and moderates debate forums Maintains a pleasant learning environment Motivates students Oversees possible social networks associated to the course (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Oversees quality

Performs a final qualitative test before course start Reports on technical issues

Glance et al. (2011) point out the lack of consensus on the optimal level of presence in online learning environments: from “sage on the stage”, to “guide on the side” and “ghost in the wings” (Mazzolini & Madison, 2007). In MOOCs, the teacher should not need to participate in forums, provided that the communication channels with students have been properly set up and that curators and facilitators fulfil their role satisfactorily. I focus next on some concrete aspects of the facilitator role throughout the different stages of the course. In this sense, it is relevant to be reminded that the first MOOCs experiences date back to 2011 and their outbreak only took place in 2012— even if they sometimes seem to have been around for at least a decade, due to their

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widespread reverberation. Thus, there is not enough information among students about their specific operation and features. As Kizilcec (2013, p. 67) claims: “ Most of these [MOOC] learners would benefit from increased guidance on how to use MOOCs to enhance their learning.” He states in his research that a big majority of students have no self-taught competence or are “MOOC-ready.” Moreover, research such as that of Sharples, Andrew, Weller, Ferguson, FitzGerald, Hirst, & Gaved (2013) confirms that enrolling in a MOOC without having previously developed specific study skills and work habits can be frustrating and lead to early dropouts. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that facilitators start their performance with a Module 0 for MOOC induction, where brief tutorials on the technical platform supporting the course and its tools are also advisable. One of the aspects to be highlighted is, precisely, the lack of communication with the teaching team and the clarification of the different agents and resources available for the interaction. In order to achieve optimal levels of cognitive interaction in these massive environments, the facilitators also undertake the task of establishing a ‘netiquette’ policy and making it explicit, so that the interaction originating in the forums helps build up the cognitive skills of the students and generates a feeling of belonging to a learning community, while helping students understand discourse expectations. I describe next six recommendations that facilitators should pass on to the students in the “access and motivation” stage of the course (Salmon, 2003): 1. First of all, it is advisable to appeal to the need of conciseness and accuracy in student exchanges by reminding them that summarizing skills are essential in massive environments: “Try to be dynamic in your contributions: use short questions and –if possible– answers.”(This and the following are literal excerpts from the course “German for Spanish Speakers: Fundamentals”). 2. It is also crucial to explicitly highlight the academic nature of the forums. It is a fact that students tend to mistake the register, not distinguishing academic forums from other digital leisurely environments typical of the social networks: “Try to contribute with more than just your opinion: experiences, references from other authors, links, etc.” 3. Selection skills are paramount in these environments in order to avoid being overwhelmed, which boosts a feeling of frustration and leads to course failure and dropout: “Choose those issues which you find more interesting and avoid participating in all the discussions: quality over quantity.” 4. As noted elsewhere, further from the teacher’s efforts to contrive a clear structure to guide interaction in a systematic way, it is essential to foster the skill of producing effective headlines among the students, that is, of summarizing the gist of their communicative act in one or two words, in order to cope with the enormous amount of information generated in these environments: “Think out the subject line of your message, and make it meaningful.” 5. Given the original connectivist nature of these MOOCs and their operation based on voting to get badges for social recognition within the community (karma), it is



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important to make this system explicit in this early stage: “Keep in mind that your course-mates may assess your participation positively, if they deem your message worthwhile, or negatively, if it is confusing or makes them waste their time. Use the power of your vote: you’ll help make interesting contributions stand out.” 6. Finally, one of the features that massive environments share with other nonmassive, online environments is the great advantage of asynchrony in computermediated communication at the forums. The tendency to impulsive, hurried communication that usually finds its way into these environments can be minimized by making it apparent from the very beginning: “Above all, take advantage of this asynchronous tool: read and think, then write.” The curator must be an expert in the course contents. This function would be ideally taken up by members of the teaching team itself, although this is uncommon. The curator’s task is mostly framed by the last two phases in Salmon’s model (“Development” and “Knowledge construction”, see figure 2), which in these environments run however parallel from the very inception of the course, given the students’ irregular access and learning pace. In order to avoid dysfunctions and frustrations, the curator must conform to the peer-learning theoretical frame during the tuition (vs. top-down approach), understanding right from the beginning the lack of control on students’ learning, compared to that of traditional systems. This entails moderately slowing interventions down, so as to let students themselves act as clarifiers in the forums. A delay of at least 48 hours is recommended before answering questions unsolved by peers.

5.4.2.1 The Role of the Teacher as Course Manager and Administrator Throughout all the phases comprising the MOOCs, the teacher must administrate and manage all the elements thereof. To that end, they must in the first place be proficient in all the supporting technological tools, so that the appropriate resources can be chosen and suggested. This is particularly relevant in Language MOOCs. For example, recording a video presentation from the teaching team inviting students to do the same as a P2P task (encouraging pronunciation practice at early stages of the course) contributes, on the one hand, to demonstrate leadership qualities (Muñoz Carril et al., 2013); on the other, it works as a learning-conductive icebreaker in this early stage (socialization, see Salmon, 2003). The role as course manager and leader is made apparent through the use of massive emails and, overall, the course blog. It seems quite well-established that restricting publication in the blog to the educators’ team helps provide a coherent reference to students, pinpointing the guiding principles throughout the learning process. The following figure shows a sample in relation to video subtitling:

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 Language Teaching in MOOCs: the Integral Role of the Instructor

Figure 5.6: Blog posting restricted to the teaching team¹⁰

Undoubtedly, another tool which provides cohesion to the course is email—and one which the educators’ team must handle carefully lest it create saturation among students. In my experience, the use of email as a teaching tool to provide weekly feedback and positive reinforcement to students is one of the most effective and highlyregarded options. Recent research carried out by Coursera insists on the encouraging power of these emails, which boost the commitment to remain engaged with the course by several percentage points, thus improving the controversial dropout figures, and much conversely to “threatening” emails with reminders on tasks deadlines. The following excerpt presents one of this positive feedback emails from the course “German for Spanish Speakers: Fundamentals”: Liebe Lerner und Lernerinnen, We have great news just two weeks down from course start: you’re highly committed and willing to learn. Some of you are still joining in; that’s not a problem, the course is open until Jan 14. Kudos! to those making steady progress, each at his/her own pace: •

Almost 73% of all enrolled students have already begun the course.

1  “We’re taking advantage of a student’s query (many thanks for bringing it up!) to let you know that the videos in this course have been captioned manually (i.e., the educators team has personally undertaken the correction of the quite faulty automatic captions). You just need to activate the option “Spanish (Spain). We’re well aware of the importance of subtitles as a fundamental resource when using audiovisual resources to learn a foreign language. It has taken up quite some time, but we’re certain that the captions will provide much-valued additional aid in your learning of German. Bis bald!”



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•

80% of those starting Module 1 have finished it up already: Congrats: you’ve just broken a record! Herzlichen Glückwunsch!

•

Besides, 35.5% have now started working hard on Module 2—almost one third have completed that one too: Good job!

•

Engagement in discussion keeps growing exponentially: you keep proving that collaborative work pays out.

We’re heading on to our third week together: keep up the spirit, and keep pushing. There’s plenty of time ahead, and don’t hesitate to raise any issues in the forums. […]”

5.4.3 Before, during, and after the MOOC: the Teacher’s Role as Researcher The analytical evaluation of language courses in online environments open to a massive number of students provides a huge amount of potential information to help find out improvement factors after their formative assessment. As Williams (2013, p.13) claims, MOOCs not only give information about the learning styles of the students enrolled, but they also provide a most valuable platform to investigate how knowledge is acquired: “The large number of students and the computerized means of instruction mean that MOOCs are very amenable to experimentation and careful observation.” Recent research endorses the importance of the analysis of MOOC course metrics, which can be used to improve course design and achieve higher rates of completion (Kizilcec, Piech, & Schneider, 2013). The almost absolute lack of investigation to date opens up an invaluable horizon for the analysis and execution of formative assessment and investigation-action programs to the Language MOOC teacher. This researcher role must be foreseen in the preliminary course stages by preparing surveys, diagnostic tests and other usual resources for quantitative and qualitative analysis. It must go on throughout the course with intermediate testing, and must be completed with final questionnaires, analysis and conclusions. In a pioneering study on the participation of students in a Foreign Language MOOC, and based on Nunan’s (1992) proposal, Bárcena, Read, Martin-Monje, & Castrillo (2014) put forward a mixed-method approach for the investigation of these environments by combining quantitative and qualitative data. As to quantitative data, MOOC platforms themselves provide relevant information for analysis. The data related to standard MOOC course metrics that get automatically saved on the online platforms refer at least to three dimensions: 1. System interaction data (i.e. number of registrations, clicks, navigation, pauses, pages access, time-on-task, successful submissions, modules completed, etc.). 2. Interaction data (i.e. discussion forum posts, visits to forums, blog access, wiki entries, etc.). 3. Profile data–personal information.

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In addition to the study habits of the students and their profiles (Williams, 2013), qualitative analysis can be effected via anonymous assessment questionnaires filled out by the students themselves, in which several aspects related to methodology, satisfaction, perception on knowledge acquisition, etc. are included. Spontaneous student participation in the forums is also a precious assessment tool, supplying significant data for qualitative assessment. As stated by Downes (2010) “There are different tools for measuring learning engagement, and most of them are quantificational […] But to think that constitutes analytics in any meaningful sense would be a gross oversimplification. There is a whole set of approaches having to do with content analysis. The idea is to look at contributions in discussion forums, and to analyse the kind of contribution. Was it descriptive? Was it on-topic? Was it evaluative? Did it pose a question?”. As highlighted in the Horizon Report (2012, p.8), the analytics data supplied by online activities will enable a sustained improvement in the learning results for these environments. In that sense, LMOOCs offer a unique opportunity to set teachers and researchers on track by addressing language learning methods and strategies on a large scale. Such an empirical research enables a comprehensive review of a great number of language teaching methods and subsequently frameworks. As vast amounts of discursive data are usually generated and collected in LMOOCs, analysis and computational tools have to be used to represent the networks of the activity, to identify themes in the data, etc. and also for analysis and interpretation of the qualitative research data. It seems that learning analytics can be powerful in giving meaning to interactions and actions in learning environments such as generated on MOOCs, providing scope for personalized learning and the creation of more effective learning environments and experiences.

5.5 Conclusion This paper has sought to identify and describe the roles and competences of the online language teacher in massive open courses by drawing on my own experience and building up on the roles described for online language educators in non-massive, non-open environments. In my study, I have focused on the connectivist course model which, to my knowledge, is the most suitable one because of its possibilities for interaction in the negotiation of meaning and for practicing the different skills needed to learn a foreign language. However, I combine the connectivist model with features belonging to the xMOOC model. I propose a framework to develop LMOOCs that links to Salmon’s theoretical tutoring model and that is based on Hampel & Stickler’s skills pyramid, however focusing on Crompton’s framework that includes the three major sets of online language teaching: technology, pedagogy and evaluation. To identify the roles of the language teacher within the MOOCs, I propose a classification according to the several stages of the course. Firstly, I describe the wide range



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of roles that come into place before the MOOC runs: the teacher as structure designer and content generator. At this stage is where the main task of LMOOC’s teacher is shifted. For the course instructional design I propose a systematic, sequential plan based on Mastery Learning following four steps. Moreover, I suggest applying heuristic strategies to present and transmit the contents of the course. As an assessment designer and evaluator, the teacher has to develop self- and peer assessment tasks, including readily accessible keys, with an appropriate feedback raising language awareness among students. I recommend a voluntary approach to these activities due to MOOC’s connectivist nature. Regarding the designing and structuring of the communication tools I present a table with their likely application in LMOOCs. In that sense, I also propose a rigid forum structure based on categories and subcategories in order to avoid multiple-threaded conversations that can result overwhelming to most language learners. Secondly, I introduce the two new roles that have arisen to support the teacher team in order to make tuition feasible in LMOOCs: the forum curator and facilitator roles according to the holistic model. Furthermore, I include the role of the teacher as a course manager and administrator, providing cohesion, feedback and positive reinforcement to students. And finally, I describe the teacher’s role as a researcher within LMOOCs, what enables the analytical evaluation of language courses open to a massive number of students providing a huge amount of potential information to help find out improvement factors in language teaching. The rapid evolution of this type of learning environment, partly due to the progress made in the field of artificial intelligence and task automation, makes it necessary to constantly and thoroughly revise these roles and methodological strategies. MOOCs are expanding, not only language learning horizons, but also language teaching research.

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Read, T. & Rodrigo, C. (2014). Towards a quality model for UNED MOOCs. Proceedings of the European MOOC Stakeholder Summit 2014, (pp.282-287). Retrieved Mars 24, 2014, from http:// emoocs2014.eu/sites/default/files/Proceedings-Moocs-Summit-2014.pdf. Sadler, P.M. & Good, E. (2006). The impact of self– and peer–grading on student learning. Educational Assessment, 11, 1, (pp.1–31). Retrieved Mars 19, 2014, from http://dx.doi. org/10.1207/s15326977ea1101_1. Salmon, G. (2003). E-moderating: the key to teaching and learning online (2nd edn). London & New York: Routledge Falmer. Schneider, E. (2013). Welcome to moocspace: a proposed theory and taxonomy for massive open online courses. AIED 2013 Workshops Proceedings Volume I,4., 2-9. Sharples, M., MC Andrew, P., Weller, M., Ferguson, R., FitzGerald, E., Hirst, T. & Gaved, M. (2013). Innovating pedagogy 2013. Open University Innovation Report 2. Milton Keynes: The Open University. Siemens, G. & Tittenberger, P. (2009). Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning. Retrieved Mars 24, 2014, from http://elearnspace.org/Articles/HETL.pdf. Stickler, U. & Hauck, M. (2006). What does it take to teach online? Towards a pedagogy for online language teaching and learning. CALICO Journal, 23(3), 463–475. Sluijsmans, D., Dochy,F. & and Moerkerke, G. (1998). Creating a learning environment by using self–, peer– and co–assessment-. Learning Environments Research, 1, 3, 293–319. Retrieved Mars 20, 2014, from http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1009932704458. Simpson, O. (2012). Supporting Students for Success in Online and Distance Education. New York: Routledge. Strickler, U. & Hampel, R. (2007). Designing online tutor training for language courses: a case study. Open Learning, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 75–85. Swaffar,J., Romano,s., Markley, P. & Arens, K. (Eds.) (1998). Language Learning Online. Theory and Practice in the ESL and L2 Computer Classroom. Austin: Daedalus Group. Talaván Zanón, N. (2013). La subtitulación en el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras. Barcelona: Octaedro. Taras, M. (2010). Student self–assessment: Processes and consequences. Teaching in Higher Education, 15, 2, 199–209. Retrieved Mars 20, 2014, from http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/13562511003620027. Warschauer, M. & Kern, R. (Eds.). Networked-based Language Teaching: Concepts and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, C. (2003). Language learning in distance education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Widdowson, H.G. (1990). Aspects of Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, J.J. (2013). Improving learning in MOOCs with Cognitive Science. AIED 2013 Workshops Proceedings Volume I,4., 49-54. Yuan, L. & Powell, S. (2013). MOOCs and disruptive innovation: Implications for Higher Education. eLearning Papers, In-depth, 33, 2, (pp.1-7). Retrieved January 22, 2014, from http://www. openeducationeuropa.eu/en/article/MOOCs-and-disruptive-innovation%3A-Implicationsfor-higher-education. Zapata-Ros, M. (2013). MOOCs, una visión crítica y una alternativa complementaria: La individualización del aprendizaje y de la ayuda pedagógica. Campus Virtuales, nº 01, v. II. Retrieved January 30, 2014, from http://www.revistacampusvirtuales.es/index.php/es/revistaes/ numerosanteriores/29-voliinum1/67-voliinum1-art2.

Timothy Read

6 The Architectonics of Language MOOCs Abstract: Widespread access to the web is common these days for people; the Web 2.0 is a part of most people’s lives and it is used for a variety of functions from searching for information, communicating with family, friends or colleagues, and ever more often learning. The difficulty with such learning, however, is delimiting what resources should actually be used, being able to access them both on an individual basis and collaboratively, and structuring the entire process. Massive open online courses (or MOOCs) appear to offer a solution to this problem, since they combine free unrestricted access with the benefits of structured courses. Language MOOCs are argued to combine the best of both formal and informal learning, bringing structured educational course content and activities together with appropriate social media tools and technologies. They appear to hold enormous potential for developing language competences, especially the productive and interactive ones, when compared to closed conventional online courses. However, part of the difficulty with designing and developing effective LMOOCs lies in selecting an appropriate MOOC platform (or philosophy, xMOOC or cMOOC) and associated tool set, and preparing the most effective resources and activities for the course. In this chapter an analysis is undertaken of the architectural questions related to developing LMOOCs and some recommendations are made about how such courses should be built. Keywords: Language MOOCs, LMOOCs, MOOC Platform, Architecture

6.1 Introduction For the majority of people fortunate enough to live in a technologically-advanced society, living without access to Internet, is unthinkable11. It doesn’t matter whether we use it to get up to the minute news, read about things that interest us (there are probably few, if any, areas of knowledge that are not treated somewhere online), or use it to communicate with our family, friends or colleagues, use it we do. While Internet is the network we use, instead of referring to it, we talk about a functional abstraction that runs on top of it, namely the Web, referring to its current instance, the Web 2.0, or more likely, social media, or even the particular tool(s) that we use on a regular basis. The tools and technologies of the Web have become almost a ubiquitous part

11  This article has been developed in the context of the SO-CALL-Me research project, funded by the Spanish of Science and Innovation (FFI2011-29829). © 2014 Timothy Read This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License

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of our daily lives (McBride, 2009; Wang & Vasquez, 2012), especially with the widespread availability of these technologies. Warschauer & Grimes (2007) note that millions of people use social media to interact, collaborate, network and entertain via blogs, wikis, social networking sites and multiplayer games. People do not merely read and retrieve information but also curate, modify and share it (Lomicka & Lord, 2009). In fact, when we talked about Web 1.0, we did so in terms of technology and the new functionality of some tool or other, but when we talk about the Web 2.0, we talk about people and what they do with it. You no longer have to be a specialist or techno-geek to add new content, only someone with something to say. Given this context, it is not surprising that people want to use the Web as part of their education. If, for example, we participate in some online forum about something that interests us, then by participating, we are learning more about the subject matter covered there. Furthermore, as we interact in a Web 2.0 environment, we become familiar with the tools we find there and are hence more interested in re-applying these tools for other tasks, for example, our learning. The problem, however, is that given the great variety of online sites and tools available that can be used for these purposes, then as Clarebout & Elen (2006) argue, students don’t often make adequate choices for their learning processes, and may not use these resources in the most appropriate ways. Learning online is not a new activity, and has existed long before the Web 2.0 became popular. Many educational institutions have had their eLearning platforms or Virtual Learning Environments (henceforth, VLEs) like Moodle, Sakai, or aLF for many years, and regularly handle hundreds of thousands of students with them. In one study of higher education institutions (Weller, 2006), 86% of students reported that they used their institution’s VLE. However, arguably the difference between these courses and the learning undertaken in a Web 2.0 context is that of formal vs. informal learning (McLoughlin & Lee, 2007). The former is undertaken in closed environments where only paying students can access the materials and activities, the results of which are typically rewarded with some kind of certificate or qualification, and the latter occurs in open environments, where more emphasis is given to competence development than certification (Kalz, 2014). As Fini (2009) notes, the latter does not depend upon a given platform but integrates multiple and heterogeneous environments and tools: blogs, wiki, social networks, message systems, etc. This open learning is also taking place in the area of languages, whereas it has been argued (Firth & Wagner, 1997; Block, 2003; Johnson, 2003; Wang & Vasquez, 2012), that second language learning (henceforth, SLL) has been changing since the end of the last century, moving from being an essentially individual process to a more social one, where the cognitive acquisition metaphor is being replaced by one of interactive development. However, a difficulty with undertaking learning in this open unrestricted fashion is delimiting what should actually be learned, and structuring how it should be done. This is precisely one of the strong points in favour of courses run on VLEs, where the course designer structures the learning and provides all the relevant resources



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and the scaffolding required by the students. One of the weak points, however, is the cost associated with undertaking these courses, where potentially large numbers of students of such courses are unable to sign up and participate in them for various reasons (including high cost, complex registration procedure, inflexible access conditions, limited course numbers, etc.). When massive open online courses (henceforth, MOOCs) appeared, they seemed to offer a solution to this problem, since they combine the benefits of structured courses with free unrestricted access. The social dynamics of such courses, that is to say, large student numbers with no direct teacher or tutor present, foster peer interaction which, if undertaken in the second language, is important for the development of the relevant competences, although they are certainly challenging for students who are not used to studying in such an autonomous manner. As the typically high registration numbers show, students are motivated to take part in these courses, partially for the reasons that Belanger & Thornton (2013) highlight: namely, that MOOCs support lifelong learning and are fun, entertaining, and convenient to do, potentially overcome traditional barriers (such as course fees, geographical location, etc.), and provide an opportunity for many less fortunate people to access education. Yuan & Powell (2013) argue that the appeal of these courses come from the current globalisation and momentum for internationalisation in higher education. It is estimated that by 2020, there will be almost 120 million students (many with limited economic resources) demanding education, together with changing learner demographics and an increasing number of adults also looking to improve/update their capabilities.

6.2 Language MOOCs As the title of this book indicates, there is a new generation of MOOCs for SLL beginning to appear, or what can be called Language MOOCs (henceforth, LMOOCs). It can be appreciated that LMOOCs could be attractive for both language students and teachers, if they combined the best of both formal and informal learning, bringing structured educational course content and activities together with appropriate social media tools and technologies. The possibilities they hold for developing language competences, especially the productive and interactive ones, arguably go way beyond what is available in small student-number online courses. The relation of structure to interaction depends on both the course designer and also the underlying MOOC platform and tools available, if one is being used at all. While there are a lot of MOOC platforms and technologies available at the moment, and an ever-increasing collection of language courses on them, the actual freedom that a teacher has when designing a given course, and conceiving what resources, activities and tools should be used, is not always obvious. As was noted above, VLEs have housed the majority of online courses before MOOCs appeared. This is particularly the case in distance education, where the

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institutions have finely tuned their eLearning systems where student learning takes place. In general, as Weller (2006) notes, VLEs are content focussed, with no strong pedagogy, and follow an online version of the traditional teacher-classroom model. They contain average tools and are not specifically geared up to meeting the needs of different subjects. As such, they have received criticism (e.g., Crick & Wilson, 2005) and other more flexible or personalised learning environments have been suggested (Attwell, 2007). As an example of the way VLEs are used, two of the largest distance education universities can be considered: UNED in Spain and The Open University in the UK, both with around 270,000 students. In the former, a platform was developed over a period of years based upon dotLRN/OpenACS (Pastor et al., 2009). It started out as a community platform oriented to forums and basic document sharing and over time the additional functionality included the incorporation of a wiki, a new document management system, a sophisticated test system, and a system for virtual attendance (Read et al., 2011). In the latter, as Weller (2006) notes, in 2004 the main platform tools were: authentication, discussion and conferencing, template-driven content delivery, blogging, audio conferencing, assignment handling, and assessment. Since then, as he notes, the university has moved toward a service-oriented architecture, where different tools and systems have been joined to complement the platform in a seamless fashion with an overall uniform look and feel. As the Web 2.0 came into general use, it wasn’t long before its potential for learning became evident. Hence, it is based upon a set of principles that describe a philosophical and functional framework (O’Reilly, 2005; Mason & Rennie, 2007): –– The Web is itself a platform, where online tools are used in the same way that software installed locally on a user’s computer might have been used previously. –– “Collective intelligence” arises out the interaction of the users of the online software, i.e., the sum of the interaction is greater than its individual parts. Valueadded resources appear online where many users have contributed relatively little information and/or comment to some resource, generally shaping and polishing it. –– The Web software is in a permanent beta version. The standard software development model several years ago consisted of the generation of programs that were distributed on disks or optical media from commercial outlets. This process was slow and meant that updates took considerable time to reach users. As the Web became more established, companies started to use online distribution as a way of getting updates to users quicker. Recently, with the advent of online software stores, it is even possible to buy the software directly there. Even though these distribution changes make it a lot easier for new versions of software to be sold and updated, the development cycle is still slow and limits how new functions are introduced into software as updates. Referring to the Web as a series of tools in permanent beta refers to the fluidity in which functions are added. As limitations



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are identified they are addressed and new functions can appear from one day to the next. –– The data of the Web sites are monitored in real time. The interaction of the users with a particular online tool or service leaves data on the site where it is located. Analysis of these data shows the ways that the users actually interact on the site and can be used to modify, improve and extend its software. However, as Wang & Vasquez (2012) argue, it is difficult to define what the Web 2.0 actually is, as different authors refer to different aspects. Zhang (2009) sees it as a rather loose concept rather than a set of technologies in rapid development. However, there is less controversy in noting its potential for SLL (e.g., Warschauer & Grimes, 2007; Sturm et al., 2009; Wang & Vasquez, 2012). From the foundation that the Web 2.0 provided, arose the notion of social media (Mayfield, 2008; Smith, 2009; Asur & Huberman, 2010), which is one of the applications that allows the generation and interchange of user generated content. Its characteristics, following Mayfield (2008), are participation, openness, conversation, community and connectedness. For educational purposes, de Waard (2012) presents the way in which some of these tools can be used for educational purposes: –– Idea and content sharing via microblogging can be undertaken using Twitter (sharing short messages), which can be used for meetings or discussions. A given hashtag (#) can be used to keep track of specific topics –– Social networking can be undertaken on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn (users can add to the knowledge creation of the learner), which can be used for interacting with people with a common interest. –– Social bookmarking can be done with Delicious or Diigo (find and share bookmarked items related to the topic), useful for organizing relevant online resources. –– Multimedia sharing can be done with YouTube or Vimeo (audio and/or videos can be recorded and shared), useful for storing and sharing recordings for and between the students. –– Blogs can be made with Word-press, Blogger or Posterous (users can write about what they are doing as a log), useful for keeping track of resources related to what someone is doing or showing evidence of learning. –– Virtual meetings can be undertaken with Skype, Google Hangouts, Big Blue Button (for synchronous communication), useful for meetings, discussions/ brainstorming or, in the context of SLL, practising oral production/comprehension competences. –– Sharing presentations can be done using Slideshare or Prezi (an immediate way of sharing knowledge on a certain subject), useful for preparing activities, presentations for assignments, etc. –– Collaborative reference managers such as Zotero or Mendeley (building reference lists, or literature reviews), are useful as knowledge base for a project or as bibliography for a collaborative report.

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Other social media tools include aggregation/curation systems like Storify and Pinterest, which are useful for collecting and organising course content. Given the widespread use of mobile devices, it is not surprising that social media has been adapted for use there. Kaplan (2012) introduces the notion of mobile social media and defines four types: –– Space-timers (location and time sensitive), with Facebook Places or Foursquare, useful for interchanging messages that are relevant for a specific location at one specific point in time. –– Space-locators (only location sensitive), with Yelp or Qype, useful for interchanging messages that are relevant for one specific location, and are tagged as such to be read later by others at the same location. –– Quick-timers (only time sensitive), with Twitter or Facebook updates, useful for increasing immediacy. –– Slow-timers (neither location, nor time sensitive), with a YouTube video or a Wikipedia entry, useful for transferring traditional social media applications to mobile devices. Carlson et al. (2012) note that in general the most commonly used social media tools within education are blogs and wikis, followed by podcasts and social networking tools. Previously, Clarebout & Elen (2004) had presented a finer-grained classification of all computer tools that can be useful in general for education: information resources (text documents, graphics, video, Web sites), cognitive tools (concept maps, simulations), knowledge modelling tools (semantic networks), performance support tools (calculator, databases), information gathering tools (to help students seek information), conversation and collaboration tools (email, videoconferencing) and elaboration tools (to give access to reviews, exercises, practices). Wang & Vasquez (2012) note that, in general, there is little research on the application of these technologies for SLL, where the most studied area is second language writing. They summarise the pros and cons of the inclusion of these tools in learning environments as follows: firstly, the pros, that they help to create learning environments that are comfortable, collaboration-oriented and community-based (thereby improving student interaction, as well as facilitating output in the target language, and leading to favourable attitudes toward learning). Secondly, the cons, that the tools can lead to frustration due to inability to differentiate between standard and non-standard forms of the target language. Students focus on meaning when blogging, and not on language accuracy. Many need to be prepared by teachers for interaction and they often see their blogs as being private. Some of the most common social media tools, such as wiki and blogs, have become available in most VLEs. While this may give the illusion of facilitating networked learning, the essentially closed nature of these platforms greatly limit the possibilities for interaction with people not from the course, something that is very important for developing SLL competences. In essence, the Web 2.0 philosophy is not



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just about being able to use tools like wikis and blogs with the closed circle of course peers but more about being able to use the tools you want, where you want, with other people that are doing similar things, because they have similar interests. Arguably, the first MOOC undertaken, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Online Course (Cormier, 2008) was put together around Web 2.0/social media tools using an RSS motor to keep participants up to date on course novelties and progress (Downes, 2010). Obviously, this was possible because the course was a cMOOC and not an xMOOC. The former uses many different platforms and follows a Connectivist approach (see below). The latter reflects more standard online courses found in institutional VLEs that have a structure which follows classroom-based instruction. So, for any teacher interested in running an LMOOC, there are some questions that need to be answered before starting to develop the course, regarding the environment where the course will be run and the tools available for it. Firstly, does an LMOOC require a different platform than any other MOOC? Secondly, is it really necessary to use a dedicated MOOC platform? Thirdly, if there are already similar courses on institutional VLEs, wouldn’t it just be a question of removing the access restrictions to the particular course to make it a viable LMOOC platform? In order to answer the first question, it is necessary to establish the optimal pedagogic framework for SLL in an online context, and as such, which tools and types of interaction are necessary. Such an analysis goes beyond the objectives of this chapter. What is possible here is to contemplate a course environment that permits an integrated use of instructivist learning techniques (e.g., Mesh [2010] points out that instruction is useful to provide beginners with basic language structures, lexicon and pronunciation) and constructivist learning techniques (e.g., Laurillard [2007] identifies discursive processes [dialogue, concept exchange], interactive processes [task-based experimentation, meaningful feedback], adaptive processes [linking or adapting ideas from theory to practice] and reflective processes [thinking about the interactive process and feedback to achieve task objectives]). Therefore, if a given MOOC platform and its tools permit such techniques to be used, then it could be applied to an LMOOC course as well. The major differences with other MOOCs are the tools required for the oral competences. To answer the second question, for a platform to be suitable for MOOCs, as well as its ability to provide the functions required for the pedagogic framework (as noted above), there are also questions regarding its scalability and robustness for a potentially large number of students interacting in different ways. As any tech-savy educationalist is aware, it is very easy to download a platform like Moodle to our office computer and set it up and have it running in a question of minutes. However, we would be deluded if we thought that it could be possible to host a course in that environment for a large number of students. MOOCs, as their name suggests, may have such numbers. When these students try to access a given platform, to login, use course resources, interchange messages, etc., they are placing a load on the computer architecture underpinning the platform: network capacity, the memory present in the

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platform server, processor capability, database access, etc. All of these factors can lead to delays in responding to a user’s activity within the platform: in the best case, making the course interaction slower than desired, and in the worst, causing the platform to crash or lose a user’s data. Hence, a given VLE that is already being used for other courses at a particular institution, if it fulfils the pedagogic requirements, could be used for MOOCs12. Some authors, such as Yuan & Powell (2013), actually state that MOOCs are just an extension of existing online learning approaches in terms of open access to courses and scalability. The potentially very high student numbers which these courses sometimes attract (up to tens of thousands) usually cause educational institutions to set up separate platforms to prevent them from negatively impacting upon the functionality of their paid courses. Furthermore, organisations with no previous VLE or private companies dedicated to MOOC production, typically opt for using a dedicated platform. In which case, it is easier for them to start from the beginning with a specific MOOC platform, rather than adapting another VLE. To say that it is possible to use a VLE for LMOOCs is to ignore what has been said previously about the importance of Web 2.0, both its philosophy and tools, since almost all VLEs do not really enable it to be applied. Just opening up access to a given SLL course on a VLE could in theory make it possible to use it as a MOOC, answering question three. However, the pedagogic differences (normally there are active teachers or tutors in closed online courses) and functional tool differences would limit the effectiveness of the course. These aspects would have to be adapted and the result would probably be quite mediocre. As Fini (2009) notes, the transition from Open Educational Resources (henceforth, OERs) to open online courses, or MOOCs, represent a shift from a content-centred model towards “socialization as information objects”. He calls students involved in this process “networked lifelong learners”. Furthermore, some authors give emphasis to the importance of the learning community in relation to the educational resources a platform might have, and explicitly contemplate the use of a social network engine with (or instead of) a standard VLE (Montes et al., 2013; Teixeira & Mota, 2013). Such an approach follows Digman (2008), who notes that social media represents a gradual decentralisation of content and online contact, where VLEs force content and people to be organised hierarchically, whereas social networks enable users to establish such associations on their own.

12  It should be noted that the direct application of a given VLE to MOOCs almost always requires some kind of modification, since there are usually slight differences in the tools present that make them unsuitable for these courses; for example, most forum tools in VLEs don’t include a Karma or voting system for the messages that are so useful in MOOCs.



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6.3 Language CMOOCS vs. XMOOCS When considering what type of platform (and tools) is appropriate for LMOOCs, it is also necessary to take into account the differences between the MOOC models that exist. While several are identified in the literature, the two most common ones are cMOOCs and xMOOCs (Downes, 2008; Cormier & Siemens, 2010; Daniel, 2012). As Yuan & Powell (2013) note, the former explore pedagogies and emphasise connectedness, collaborative learning, and the latter, extend standard classroom inspired institutional educational models. Such connectedness is argued by Mesh (2010) to be related to SLL contexts where peers establish connections to generate knowledge and discourse. Such a view is compatible with that of Downes (2007), who views learning as part of a wider environment of conversation and interaction, thereby creating a learning network that reshapes itself based upon the conversations and considers learners not only as the subjects of learning, but also its source (Downes, 2010). The great majority of MOOC are xMOOCs because they are a continuation of other types of eLearning courses that institutions have undertaken, and are hence familiar and easy to run and manage. The very loosely coupled nature of cMOOCs make them difficult to control from an institutional perspective, and more importantly, the majority of the content developed in the course and its related social interaction would not be on the institution’s platform, and therefore, not under its control, or for that matter, under the supervision of any course moderators, facilitators or curators, something that can be seen as potentially dangerous for student development (Brennan, 2014). In the literature, xMOOCs and cMOOCs have been compared many times. Macness (2013), for example, summaries the key differences between them as follows: –– cMOOCs do not run on a single platform (but are distributed across many). –– xMOOCs promote participant diversity, in the sense of transmitting the same message to thousands, whereas cMOOCs focus more on the diversity of approaches and resources, developed and distributed in many different ways. –– Original cMOOCs are based upon open education and OERs. Copyrights prevent content from being locked into any particular platform or individual. –– cMOOCs promote immersion and are more disruptive than xMOOCs. They are not designed to serve the mission of a given institution. –– Participants of cMOOCs have to be selective because of the large amounts of complex learning resources generated in the course. Since the distributed course environment is constantly changing, they have to be self-organising. –– Key activities in cMOOCs include the remixing, repurposing and co-creation of content and interaction. Yeager et al. (2013) identify four types of activities key to the success of students in cMOOCs: aggregation/curation (bringing together links to existing resources), remixing (documentation, blogging, etc.), repurposing/constructivism (where users arguably build their own internal connections) and feeding forward (sharing new content,

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resources, summaries, etc., with others). When considering LMOOCs, learning a language requires the development of competences related to four different kinds of language activities (Council of Europe, 2001): reception (listening and reading), production (spoken and written), interaction (spoken and written), and mediation (translating and interpreting). In face-to-face classroom situations these competences can be trained by activities and tasks directly. In online courses tools are required to compensate for the separation between the students. SLL revolves around oral and written comprehension and production. Historically, more resources and tools have been available for written skill development since it is much easier to read and write online, and share the textual results with other people, than it is for the oral counterparts. As technology has improved over the years, the tools have included newer functions for (amongst other things) shared writing, the possibility of adding comments, etc. GoogleDrive and its word processor is a good example of this kind of tool. The online development of oral skills had to wait for network bandwidths and speeds to improve to such an extent that audio and video could be distributed online in real time. Since then, research has shown how effective audio/video conferencing is in online language courses (e.g., Hampel & Hauck, 2004). When considering LMOOCs, the lack of a teaching team to give feedback or guide the students with activities that can be modified following the students’ progress, or as the result of encountered difficulties or questions, requires the careful selection of tools that can be used to facilitate the types of interactions that will compensate, to some extent, for this lack. If the author of a particular LMOOC uses a standard xMOOC platform, then the actual set of tools available will be limited and typically include: –– Different types of reading materials: these can include Web pages, structured PDF files or URLs to content outside of the platform. Some documentation can be designed to read from within the course and other to work as hand-outs, which can be downloaded for later offline study. –– Audio/video recordings: these are typically developed and stored away from the platform, using video cameras, microphones, etc., or even Webcams or the cameras available in smartphones or tablets. The resulting recording is then uploaded to a social video site such as YouTube or Vimeo. What is included in the course is a URL to the recording. In order to make such a recording accessible for people with handicaps, transcripts can be included. –– Activities and exercises: the basic evaluation mechanism here are closed multiple-choice tests. For questions with open answers, any that require free writing cannot be automatically checked (very easily) so typically the answers are provided for the students to check after having answered. Alternatively, some peerto-peer (henceforth, P2P) correction options are possible or even the use of natural language processing and artificial intelligence techniques to undertake



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automatic correction. Some platforms, like edX13 for example, also permit more sophisticated activity types such as those related to circuit schemas, the drag-ndrop of object or images, math expressions, etc. –– Forums: they are a key component in these courses since they do only provide a way for people to participate in discussions but also, thanks to the voting and karma system (EDUCAUSE, 2012), providing a valuable mechanism for students to help each other and answer doubts that their peers might have. As can be appreciated, this set of tools is far from optimal for the development of SLL competences. For oral and written comprehension, having access to textual material and audio/video recordings is a useful starting point for developing understanding. However, interactive activities, arguably of a social nature, are needed to enable the students to internalise the meaning and truly integrate the new vocabulary, syntactic structures, etc., into what they already have. Following the SLL literature, once a minimum foundation of theory has been established, a communicative approach is widely accepted to be the most appropriate (Knight, 2003), as it involves aspects of social constructivist theory where, for example, the role of a language teacher could be replaced by that of a facilitator of communication (cf. facilitator in a MOOC) (Mesh, 2010). Hence, if a course is designed to harness the necessary resources and activities, such a constructivist approach can provide the conditions for the development of communicative abilities (following, for example, Warschauer, 1998; Roed, 2003; Compton, 2004). Furthermore, scaffolding should be provided in order to support the learner as s/he participates in new and increasingly more complex activities (Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994; Chapelle, 2001). While a standard xMOOC platform provides ways of including tasks and exercises, there is a problem of granularity, where a block of text or a single recording is typically followed by a highly structured activity. This does not provide a student with the communicative opportunity to use what has just been seen/heard in an open and flexible way, obtaining fine-grained feedback of different and complementary types, depending on what s/he has produced. A similar yet larger problem exists for language production. Written production can be undertaken with ease since it involves the same tools that are used for virtually anything one does online. Oral skills are harder to practice. In some cases a platform will have a tool that enables small audio/video recordings to be made and uploaded, whereupon students can comment on them as part of a P2P activity. However, this is not the norm, and in a similar way to the previously commented interaction regarding the materials provided in an xMOOC for comprehension, the granularity and flexibility of the oral interaction here is very restricted.

13  http://ca.readthedocs.org/en/latest/problems_tools/advanced_problems.html

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6.4 Conclusion In this chapter, it has been argued that social media offer a way for SLL competences to be developed because they provide a familiar, rich, flexible and easy to use set of tools that can facilitate the interaction between people. Such interaction promotes real communication and enables students to explore both production and comprehension in the target language in a meaningful and enjoyable way. This would appear to support the use of cMOOCs. However, as Brennan (2014) notes, Connectivism as the learning theory underlying cMOOCs, does not take into account a student’s prior knowledge, the cognitive load of materials or resources (or the sheer volume of information, number of tweets, posts, etc.), the difficulty of activities (with no sequencing nor guidance on how to undertake them), the need to work across several different platforms (where the information can be found is not always clear, the sensation of never having enough information, etc.), or any of the many different issues related to the needs of novices (e.g., the feeling that the others are all connecting and learning and that you are not). Even though there are few cMOOCs for SLL, the limitation of the connectivist method for learning languages can be highlighted by the fact that the Web contains vast amounts of resources and social media developed specifically for this purpose. For example, a search on Google for “learn English online” gives almost 1.5 billion results, and yet there are very few people who are capable of becoming proficient users of a second language that way. As was noted above, following Clarebout & Elen (2006), students presented with an overly large set of learning resources and tools don’t often make the most adequate choices regarding how to structure their learning. Hence, the fundamental question for LMOOC authors and designers is how to produce a course that can overcome the limitations of both cMOOCs and xMOOC platforms. As in every aspect of life, balance is essential. Experience appears to show that while structure is fundamental, the benefits of Connectivism cannot be overlooked. A middle ground is required that enables a hybrid-xMOOC to be designed, including cMOOC features, such as external social media tools, and the like, going beyond the limitations of the basic tools provided in the platform to provide a finer grained level of interaction. This is not just a question of linking in Twitter and/or Facebook to an existent LMOOC, and including some activities that makes use of them, but more of a fundamental restructuring of the course to move the emphasis of study away from working in the platform by watching a series of video recordings, undertaking superficial activities and doing automatically corrected tests, toward a semi-distributed cMOOC-like structure, where the students undertake a lot of their own content curation and productive skill development off the platform, and then come back to share with the group what has been happening and prepare for the next step in the learning process. To this end, as well as the second language resources that make up the course, an LMOOC should also contain basic information on how to use the external social media tools for the intended SLL, and then use an iterative spiral approach

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for the course, where the students work within the platform, then spiral out to other platforms to use relevant social media (interacting with other people not necessarily on the course), and then come back to share the results in the main course, again and again. It seems to be the case that this approach would include the benefits of a cMOOC and avoid its many problems for novice SLL students, and as such, should be explored in the next generation of language MOOCs.

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Covadonga Rodrigo

7 Accessibility in Language MOOCs Abstract: ELearning environments are rapidly evolving towards more a revolutionary computer and mobile-based scenario along with social technologies that will lead to the emergence of new kinds of learning applications that enhance communication and collaboration processes. The flexibility of the learning service provided by MOOCs allows students to learn at their own time, place and pace, enhancing continuous communication and interaction between all participants in knowledge and community building. This learning system especially benefits people with disabilities and can improve their social inclusion. However, access to the MOOC platform can also add extra difficulties such as the need to develop specific digital or even social skills. In this paper a set of specific strategies regarding the achievement of accessibility in all aspects of the overall MOOC system (from content to user preferences) along with references to the applicable standards. Keywords: MOOC, usability, accessibility, standards, social inclusion

7.1 Introduction It is a proven fact that new technologies, specifically Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), contribute dimensions which have, to date, been inaccessible to people with disabilities by providing them with the resources they lack and strengthening their capacities. (Dobransky & Hargittai, 2006; Seymour, 2005).This gives them greater autonomy and independence by breaking down their isolation and lack of communication and promoting their family and social integration. All of this leads to an improvement in their state of mind and personal self-affirmation; in short, their quality of life. As regards the possibilities that ICT offer people with visual, auditory and mobility disabilities; in order to improve their well-being, promote their training and therefore their potential for entering the workforce (i Díaz & Bonjoch, 2007; Vila et al, 2007), there are numerous studies looking in depth into both the ease of and difficulties in accessing and using the different types of technology that they come up against, thus giving rise to significant limitations when using ICT (Koon & De la Vega, 2000) and the appearance of the digital divide (Cullen, 2001). The difficulties centre especially on the use of computers and the Internet, rather than the user’s devices. This is also the case for eLearning, where teachers and students access their virtual courses on learning platforms using the web browser for their main tasks (Avgeriou, 2003). Furthermore, eLearning environments will continue to evolve © 2014 Covadonga Rodrigo This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License

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towards a more revolutionary computer and mobile-based scenario along with social technologies that will lead to the emergence of new kinds of learning applications (Kop & Bouchard, 2011; de Waard et al., 2011) that enable communication and collaboration (Kukulska-Hulme & Jones, 2011). These applications will take advantage of the unique conditions of mobility and the ubiquity of Internet access, exploring successful actions for education and social inclusion. In this context, whilst LCMS environments are most commonly deployed within universities, schools and other academic institutions, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have made open education available to the public domain by offering a free window to their courseware that students might experience in university and colleges. Higher Education institutions are shifting from closed educational platforms to new open learning environments by demonstrating that the evolution of open education on the Internet is enabling thousands of people around the world to follow different educational initiatives (Haggard, 2013; Gaebler, 2014). The flexibility of the learning service provided by MOOCs allows students to learn at their own time, place and pace, enhancing continuous communication and interaction between all participants in community building and learning. Nevertheless, access to the MOOC platform can also add extra difficulties such as the need to develop specific digital skills. As an example, the amount of audiovisual content and interactive elements (test, self-assessments, etc.) present in these types of courses, active connections with social networks, etc., may add new difficulties to the accessibility requirements, thus broadening the digital divide, and not just for people with disabilities. The pedagogical and visual design of the MOOCs, their information architecture, usability and visual and interaction design could be having a negative impact on student engagement, retention and completion rates as has been analysed previously in adult learning (Tyler-Smith, 2006). As MOOCs become more mainstream participants become less tolerant of poor usability and expect an intuitive learning platform which is enjoyable to use. Thus, an analysis of the critical factors necessary for building a specification of requirements for an accessible MOOC system is provided here, presenting an outline of language learning MOOCs´ requirements for access. The requirements for academic eLearning delivery, user profiling, adaptable and multimodal interfaces, wellknown applicable standards, together with the needs of students participating in this type of education, are taken into account in order to achieve this purpose. Accessibility issues are addressed, as regards user abilities and needs, the service domain and associated technological infrastructures. The paper is organized as follows. Firstly, some considerations on accessible learning are presented, along with their benefits for the social inclusion of vulnerable learners such as people with disabilities. Secondly, several standard-based definitions and properties of usability and accessibility are presented, discussing their application in MOOC learning, where contexts of use need to be taken into account. Thirdly, different issues as regards accessibility and combined strategies are presented to

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formalize the usability and accessibility requirements needed in MOOCs. Finally, the main conclusions are expounded.

7.2 ICT Access and its Use by People with Disabilities According to the “Access and use of ICT by people with disability” report drawn up and recently published by the Fundación Vodafone-España, it must be noted that 91.8% of people with a disability use a mobile telephone, 42.8% of them a computer and 32.5% the Internet. These figures are somewhat lower than those on average within the overall Spanish population (95.5%, 72.7% and 75.1%, respectively for each technology) even though the use of the mobile telephone among people with visual, auditory and mobility disability is practically universal. Likewise, the use of the Internet has a very significant potential yet a low percentage of use (32.9% on average) as there is a serious problem of accessibility to the Internet for the visually-impaired. The use of the Internet for these individuals is low (18.5%), far less than the average (72.7%) as there are many people who would need an adapted computer which is not available (33.0%) and others who have tried to use it but have found it not to be user-friendly (24.4%). The same is true for the use of the Internet from mobile devices, even though new intelligent telephones have very advanced configuration options as regards accessibility, especially with the iOS and Android operating systems. The collective of hearing-impaired individuals, on the other hand, tends to use ICT, making the computer (47.5%) and Internet (61.8%) the most used technologies. Furthermore, people with this kind of disability who are Internet users are those that participate in social networks the most (56.1%) and use the services of Web pages of organisations dedicated to disability support to participate in forums (36.6%). Because of the limitations caused by this type of disability, however, this population is the one which faces the greatest problems of accessibility to mobile telephones (56.3%). In the case of people with a physical disability, the use ICT is often conditioned by limited mobility. Nevertheless, in general terms, it is this group that has a greater perception of the use of the mobile telephone as a facilitator of communication and for enabling personal autonomy. Those people with a physical disability use the computer less (32.6%), and 32.5% use the Internet, mainly indicating that its use seems very advanced and complex to them (34.1%). Although a large number of these people would like to have devices adapted to or suitable for mobile telephones, Internet and computers, many of them are unable to afford them as this collective of people is especially vulnerable due to the current financial crisis, especially in specific aspects related to their disability, and their household incomes, which for the majority do not exceed €2,000 net monthly (98.3%). In any case, the price of the suitable devices seems to be a barrier but, fortunately, the



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advance in technology and the envisaged reduction in the acquisition costs will be a solution to this problem. An educational solution like MOOCs, benefitting from the use of Technology Enhanced Learning is an opportunity to mitigate the isolation of these vulnerable learner groups.

7.2.1 MOOCs Opportunity for Social Inclusion One of the factors that has been revealed as a determinant for people with visual, auditory and physical disabilities in their potential for entering the workforce is their low level of education. Thus, 81.0% of them overall have secondary studies or less. The level of education is reduced especially among the collective of people with disability who are more than 45 years old (93.8% with secondary studies or less) and among the people who have a disability related to mobility (84.9%). On the other hand, the difficulties in finding employment are added to the fact that the greatest part of the collective of people with disability work in low qualified positions (53.1%). However, the process of access and integration to people with functional diversity in the education system is positive and irreversible in our country and the rest of our environment. In Spain, the number of students with a disability who use support products and/or require adaptations to be able to enjoy the resources offered in higher education is increasing every year. There is a growing number of these students (in Spain it is close to 50%) who have an officially recognised disability and who have chosen distance-learning universities for their education. However, the majority of the applications made by these students are within the paradigm of “Permanent Learning” or Life Long Learning (LLL), so that their education, work and personal life can be integrated into a continuous process in which all citizens would be able to access knowledge and personal satisfaction through work. Permanent Learning has enjoyed very significant institutional support since the European Parliament adopted the ambitious proposal of the Commission to develop an action program unique in the area of education and training whose aim is to cover learning opportunities from infancy to adulthood under the PL paradigm with a specific sub-program centred on tackling learning and teaching needs in higher education (eInclusion, 2012). In this type of education delivery, students can attend high quality institutions, receiving accredited and recognized qualifications without leaving their own home. For learners with disabilities, this is of special importance, as travelling to learn may be very difficult for many of them and their home and work environments usually are highly adjusted to their specific needs, particularly in terms of physical access, transport and assistive technologies. To the increase in the use of information technologies, such as the Internet, can be added the rapid introduction of new elements such as audiovisual content. Initially, the content of the Web was mainly textual with the later incorporation of

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images, and little by little a large quantity of multimedia content. It is not common these days to find Internet sites that do not have audio, video, presentations, animation, etc. integrated into them. In this sense, a driving force has been precisely the beneficial application of this type of content in the area of education to favour active learning or the tendency towards the Web 2.0, in which the majority of places are based on collections of shared visual and audiovisual resources (such as Flicker or YouTube), just as in MOOCs (see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1: MOOC visual interface at UNED COMA (http:// https://unedcoma.es/)

However, the introduction of audiovisual content into eLearning platforms adds a new difficulty to the accessibility requirements, since they include new elements which widen the digital divide, and not only for people with a disability. It is becoming increasingly common to be unable to access video through not having a certain program or codec to interpret each new format. The recent addition to this new open and online learning called MOOC, the creation of new educational forms (both from the instructional and technological point of view) can be used to rethink education, also renewing inclusive education that can reach all citizens. Reaching social inclusion can only be obtained by embedding inclusive strategies. For instance, with the rise of MOOCs, a format that allows massive participation and global audiences to become more important as potential learners. Thus, the importance of targeting and including vulnerable groups in MOOCs, such as people with disabilities is emphasized. In reality, they only need to have previous access to digital technologies and new offerings such as those brought about directly by international language learning opportunities. The use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) allow more potential use and reuse of the content in the MOOC context due to their availability, including the ubiquity of the technology being used by the learners. McGill (2010) noticed that materials



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should be available on alternative technologies in order to make OERs and courses fully open and accessible. Although early MOOC emphasized open access features, such as open licensing of content, open structure and learning goals to promote the reuse and remixing of resources, some MOOC use restricted licenses for their course materials, while maintaining free access for students. The system obstacles to enter and be successful in MOOCs must be traced in order to solve them and ensure access for all. Low participation rates have implications for social development in vulnerable groups. Especially poor completion rates in education put these people into a downward spiral that can lead to social exclusion. Therefore, academic success would enable vulnerable groups, such as students with disabilities, to actively take up MOOC learning outcomes (De Waard et al., 2014). For students with special needs who might have issues with educational attainment, ability to travel or socio-economic restrictions, MOOCs offer an opportunity for self-development from within a physical space that is already adjusted to their needs.

7.3 Demands of Usability and Accessibility in MOOCs Services In practice, eLearning services are rendered mainly by means of web technologies. For this reason, eLearning represents a domain in which the paradigm for web accessibility is of immense application. In this sense, the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) from W3C promotes accessibility by means of guidelines related to the content (WCAG), the authoring tools (ATAG), and the user agents (UAAG). The multimedia formats that are very popular in MOOC platforms are based on creative audiovisual content with a high technical quality of sound and image as well as the interactive services that make the participation and communication of their students possible by facilitating accessibility for people with reduced physical disabilities and convert them to active users of the learning. Therefore, in order to achieve the degree of minimum accessibility required in the multimedia digital resources three significant aspects have to be taken into account: 1. Manufacture the content accessible in itself: in this sense, locutions are added, alternative content in the form of subtitles, audio-description, etc. by always trying to satisfy basic graphic and visual usability aspects, and respecting the types and sizes of the most accessible fonts, optimum levels of contrast, etc. 2. Making it possible to access and guarantee the content: the resources are accessible from the Internet eLearning platforms, and that those based on video can be downloaded by means of streaming 3. Intuitive interaction in user access: the educational resources are available, organised in similar collections (Delgado & Rodrigo, 2010), with information on the level of interactivity, type and duration of the content, etc.

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The term ‘usability’ derives from the term ‘user-friendly’, defined as “an expression used to describe computer systems which are designed to be simple to use by untrained users, by means of self-explanatory or self-evident interaction between user and computer” (Chandor et al., 1985). Gradually, the term user-friendly came to be criticized as having “acquired a host of undesirably vague and subjective connotations” (Bevan et al., 1991). Some authors tend to define usability in overly brief and ambiguous terms, attempting to describe its application rather informally, and without direct reference to the hardware of the device. Furthermore, there is a tendency to overlook the characteristics of the context in which a product is to be used. This usually entails jeopardizing the usability of a product in its operational environment. In addition, usability tends to be evaluated in an ad hoc manner, which makes it very difficult for experts to come to an agreement on the actual usability of the gadget or the device being evaluated (Pareja-Lora et al., 2013). A more comprehensive and precise definition of usability and of its basic attributes and indicators is required. This is particularly true when dealing more specifically with the different ICT devices used in education, where it is not possible to characterize the whole range of user experiences that comprises many different technologies, contexts of use, study modes and learning objectives. Thus, the usability of a product is not an inherent property; in fact, it depends on the context of its use, that is, on a set of different usability attributes, whose relevance and/or relative importance is determined by different types of user, tasks, environments, etc. Accordingly, it is essential to take into account the context of use when evaluating the usability of a product or service.

Figure 7.2: Forum exchange on the UNED COMA platform

The field of eLearning has seen a significant body of literature develop over the last decade in terms of eLearning accessibility, with a key focus on both LCMS (Learning



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Content Management Systems) tools and the learning content contained. MOOCs are developed for the Internet community, focusing on student self-learning and interaction with other learners in a peer-to-peer modality (see Figure 7.2), with engagement coming in the form of frequent assessment items. In many ways, the MOOC model can be simply seen as mass eLearning with a heavier reliance on peer-to-peer learning exchange rather than instructor lead assessment. Hence, producing MOOC content and activities, which being somewhat different from those found in other standard online courses, does not require the development of new skills. In this context the issue of accessibility in these platforms becomes important if the MOOCs are to meet their goals of inclusivity on a large scale. Whilst the modality of the MOOCs approach may remove physical and economic barriers, it can also highlight the same accessibility barriers that appear in any complex web-based systems. Students using support technologies may have problems while navigating in the MOOC environment, accessing the platform (registration process) and even using the learning content contained in the platform. More issues appear while doing largely automated assessments and the process of engaging with fellow students through forum posts or collaborative group work. A MOOC interface design is often determined by the platform since some of the features – learning and testing tools – cannot be edited or customized by the academic assistants. Its materials and its mode of delivery might adhere to a set of accessibility standards.

7.3.1 Accessible Interfaces MOOC platforms are the web based eLearning engines that provide mechanisms for scheduling academic curriculum, delivering various modes of assessment and allow for synchronous and asynchronous communication between instructors and students. In terms of the interface elements, such as logging in, logging out, navigating in courses and content and communicating with all stakeholders, MOOC environments have–like other LCMS–multi-layered structures across which users with disabilities must be able to navigate. Most modern LCMS environments claim to vary levels of accessibility compliance, even though new software apps have come to help develop intrinsic MOOC platforms that are still not so well described (mooc.org, Google Course Builder, Open MOOC, etc.). MOOC LCMS has not been designed and developed with accessibility in mind and some accessibility issues have been already reported (Iniesto et al., 2014). Moreover, this accessibility, if it exists, is aimed largely at the student, rather than the instructor or administrative roles. There seems to be a gap in the scientific analysis of how instructors using assistive technologies can use these systems as learning creators. Managing content can include some easy tasks such as editing the names of items, deleting items or setting the sequence of items, but not all of the approaches

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are necessarily intuitive or quick to use. Furthermore, module and content sequencing is usually managed through drag and drop operations, although keyboard alternatives are often possible. However, how usable these non-mouse alternatives are for large amounts of course management, or where complex content arrangement is required, remains unclear. Old versions of LCMS management functionalities were more “accessible” in their intrinsic conception: simple drop-down lists or numbered field values being attached to each module or content item within a module and so on. Nowadays LCMS tools have evolved to more media rich, graphically interactive web applications that greatly increase the interface complexity.

7.3.2 Learning Resources Accessibility ELearning materials are often used with a specific technology, or configuration, which can make them less available to people who have limited access capabilities or who are using non-standard computer equipment. Learners with disabilities using assistive technologies can benefit greatly from eLearning and MOOCs, not just because it allows distance and flexible learning activities, but also because it helps students with disabilities to access resources which would otherwise present significant barriers to them. These barriers can include the interface elements of the Learning platform in which materials and objects reside, and the manner in which users interact with these objects. ELearning environments typically contain a variety of components which do not always share a consistency of interface logic or interactive elements, ranging from posting in a forum, making up elements in tests or timed quizzes, to playing embedded videos or downloading a variety of document formats.

Figure 7.3: Example of an accessible videolecture from the UNED repository Cadena Campus (http:// intecca.uned.es)



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7.3.2.1 Accessible Videolectures Videolectures are key elements in the MOOC model, and the hurdles of interacting with the platform or contents should be minimized. But alternative accessible formats, subtitles, and/or sign language interpreters for audiovisual materials, audiodescription recordings are not easily available (see Figure 7.3). While some ideas are emerging from the field of social accessibility, building communities of volunteers that make transcriptions, etc. (Rodrigo, 2014) and some aspects regarding their labelling have also been identified that will improve the usability of MOOCs videolecturers (Sánchez, 2013): –– Display the unique and consistent numbering of videolectures (e.g. week number and video reference): providing a unique numeric code for each videolecture based on week number and the video reference within a week would allow students to identify and position each videolecture easily within the course. –– Use titles to describe the content of each videolecture: a descriptive title on the content of the videolecture would help students that are only interested in certain topics and those that want to rewatch a videolecture to review one topic or concept. –– Indicate of the length of each videolecture: indicating the length of the videolecture within the video title would allow students to assess the time they will need to watch the video easily, and decide whether they want to start it or not or even pick a shorter one instead. –– Mark watched and downloaded videolectures: when a student watches a videolecture the system automatically displays a check icon to show that he/her has already watched or downloaded a videolecture. This is really useful to remember where was the last time thevideo was watched and what to continue with. Icons for “completely watched”, “partially watched” and “downloaded” videolecture, could be very useful markers. –– Offer shortcuts for repeated actions: to support productivity, and avoid monotonous and repetitive work, enterprise applications often include the possibility to perform some tasks jointly for more than one item. In MOOCs, for instance, offering the users not only the option to download each videolecture individually, but also to download all videolectures of the week/course at the same time.

7.3.2.2 Accessible PDF Document Considerations The versatility of the PDF format has given rise to its rapid extension on the Web and it is the most used format to present document on Web pages. However, its wide-ranging use has given rise to worries about accessibility, especially for the users of screen readers. The information contained in PDFs prior to the launch of Acrobat 5 in 2001 is now considered practically inaccessible, in spite of there being a plug-in for Acrobat 4 which offers access to the documents.

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PDF is not recognised as a standard format by W3C; however, there are WCAG models and guidelines that regulate its use to favour its accessibility: “To provide an equivalent text for all non-textual elements. This includes images, graphic representations of the text, etc.” Guideline 1.1 WCAG 1.0 “To guarantee that the pages are accessible even when the new technologies are not compatible or are disabled.” Guideline 6 WCAG 1.0 With the launch of Acrobat 5 in 2001, Adobe allowed accessible PDF documents to be produced. A significant characteristic was the support it offered to screen readers that allowed the content of the documents to be labelled in a similar way to HTML. It also included the possibility for users to navigate the PDF document by means of a keyboard as well as filling in and sending PDF forms online. The PDF labels are used to define the structure of the document. It can be used to guarantee the order of reading the content of the page and include the paragraph attributes necessary to redistribute the text correctly in accordance with the size of the screen and the devices. The labels also provide standardisation so as to describe text characters independently of the font, in such a way that the screen readers are able to read all of the characters and words correctly. To improve accessibility in 2003 Adobe launched Acrobat 6, which allowed, together with Reader 6, voice to text content in PDF documents to be converted by means of synthesisers contained in the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Windows also integrated a wide range of support technologies such as Braille, JAWS and Window-Eyes devices. This version also allowed the PDF content to be saved as a text file or in RTF, XML, HTML and Doc format. The advances allowed authors to create complex accessible documents. However, to do so, the author has to create the documents with care and take into account the improvement in accessibility. In order for a document to be considered accessible, it must have the following characteristics: –– It must contain text in which a search may be made. It must not be a scanned image. –– If it contains forms that the user must fill in, it must be accessible, providing tabulated navigation and descriptions of each field. –– It must contain labels in order to define the structure of the document. –– A clear and easy-to-follow order of reading. –– A description for images, links and forms. –– A facility for navigating the document. –– Establish the language of the document. –– Use fonts that allow the characters to be extracted as text. –– The security options of the document must not interfere with screen readers.



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7.3.2.3 Accessible Flash Multimedia Restrictions The Flash format is frequently used to create multimedia elements. Its content is independent of the navigator and to be able to see it, the corresponding plug-in must be installed. Before version 6 of the Flash Player, the content generated was practically inaccessible to disabled users since it was not possible to add equivalent texts for either visual or auditory content. Although for users with physical disabilities this format was not a barrier. For users with cognitive or learning difficulties it was a tool that improved accessibility. As a concept, it is much easier to understand when it is presented in an animated form rather than in words. With the launch in 2002 of the Flash Player 6, Macromedia provided a media player compatible with MSAA which served as a link between deliberately created multimedia material and the support technologies that the users use. Thus, applications such as Window-Eyes and JAWS can have access to the aforementioned material. However, Flash is not independent of the device as is demanded by the WCAG guidelines. Flash has also designed a Macromedia Flash MX tool to facilitate the task of the developers of creating accessible content, allowing alternative text or descriptions to be added to the graphic elements and hide the elements that do not have content for the screen readers. Finally, another important advance towards accessibility is the existence of tools such as MAGpie (Media Access Generator), which allow the creation of subtitles and audio-descriptions in XML files. Flash parses the file and shows the information stored in it. In conclusion, the use of Flash elements can affect what is used to a greater or lesser degree according to its aim. For example, if Flash is used in navigable menus it will give rise to significant errors of accessibility due to the lack of Flash support from the support technologies. The alternative to this problem of accessing information is to provide a standard version of the content of the course, for example, in HTML format. There is also the standard SVG technology as an alternative in the field of vectorised graphics, also recommended for W3C, in spite of the need for a plug-in in order to use it and that multimedia elements cannot be included directly, unlike the Flash format.

7.4 Strategies for Improving Usability and Accessibility in MOOC Services With all of the above considerations, some strategies can be applied to improve the usability and accessibility level of MOOC systems: platforms and services as a whole. Some of them are related to adding accessibility to MOOC content repositories of learning materials (content and assessment) via specific metadata schema, defining the user profile and preferences, enabling user adaptable interfaces, using multimodal

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adaptive interfaces and including some user’s models such as User eXperience and User Centered Design Model.

7.4.1 Learning Resources Metadata to Improve Accessibility But at the time of using the Internet as a means of communication to publish multimedia content in audiovisual format, it is necessary to take different aspects into account: –– Technological: such as, for example, the user agents that must make it possible to access the information, the technology to develop and edit the resources (accessible software applications), authoring tools to facilitate the production of accessible materials or the adaptation of those already produced. –– Adapted Devices: when a user accesses a resource available on the Internet, it can be accessed directly or a device would have to be used (hardware or software) specificly: screen reader, specialised mouse, virtual keyboard, magnifying glass, etc. –– Existing Inclusive Methodologies and Educational Standards: in this sense the XML markup languages have to be mentioned, together with the use of metadata that provides the adaptability of the content according to the user profiles, formal specifications for the integration of synchronised multimedia, etc. In order to improve the accessibility of eLearning content, the Access-For-All MetaData (ACCMD) specification was developed by IMS in 2004. It describes learning content by identifying which types of resource are available in a Learning Object, which can be used to present the same content to a given learner, but by means of different media. Metadata can then be used to describe the types and the relationships between an original resource and its available adapted formats. Interpreting user profiles for choosing the appropriate content, ACCMD metadata can be exploited to describe textual alternatives that are available for images, audio descriptions for videos, transcripts or captioning for audio tracks, visual alternatives for text, and a variety of other potential alternative formats matching user’s preferences. Based on ACCMD, these appropriate alternative media resources can be retrieved and presented to the user. A visually-impaired learner, for instance, viewing a video that had entered an ACCLIP profile previously, will automatically receive that video with audio descriptions, while a hearing-impaired learner will receive the same video but with captioning included in the presentation. Furthermore, the third part of the ISO/IEC 24751:2008 accessibility standards [19] (Information technology–Individualized adaptability and accessibility in eLearning, education and training–Part 3: “Access-for-all” digital resource description) is devoted to describing the resources which make up an eLearning content (ISO DRD), with an approach which is similar to the IMS ACCMD, both standards having the same



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aim: providing information on alternatives to original resources. Then, any resource presented in an e learning content can be identified as having an original form and one or more adapted forms, depending on its media type. A limitation to these standards arise whenever eLearning content authors want to provide alternatives both to the whole original content and to each single part that makes up the entire resource (images included in a document, formatted texts, etc.). According to these standards, it is neither possible to declare those pieces of formatted text as original resources–if they are not in separated files, nor can a subset of adapted resources be declared as an alternative to a single resource. For example, a sequence of audio files cannot be identified as a single auditory resource, a video with sign language cannot be defined as an alternative to it, and a sequence of images cannot be declared as an alternative to a video. The IMS Access for All (AfA) Digital Resource Description (DRD) 3.0–draft released in 2012–aims to solve these problems by radically changing the point of view: now it is possible to declare one or more access modes for each resource, define existing accessible adaptations and whether they come from the specific original resource.

7.4.2 Assessment Accessibility Another interesting and recent IMS specification is the Accessible Portable Item Protocol (APIP), which is related to the accessibility of eLearning assessment. It provides assessment programs and questions item developers with a data model for standardizing the interchange file format for digital test items. The APIP standard is based on the IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) v2.1 specification and expands the QTI model into a complete framework, allowing the definition of accessible tests and adopts the IMS Access For All Personal Needs & Preferences (AfA PNP) v2.0 specification as the basis for supplying the user preferences to customize the presentation of the question items to fit the accessibility needs of the user.

7.4.3 Enabling User Adaptable Interfaces An effective eLearning environment should take into account each learner’s abilities, together with learning goals, where learning takes place, and which specific devices the learner uses. In this context, it is strategic to describe learner’s preferences and needs by means of a profile. How this profile interacts with the eLearning platform interface and the objects it contains can impact upon the learning experience of users with different capabilities. Given an approach that improves usability by making the user interface or content adaptable to (or by) the user, Jäppinen et al. (2005) have written about the pros and cons of adaptability in the context of mobile learning. In essence, they conclude that

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a system that could model the user and automatically regulate and organize its functioning to him/her would be very appealing, even though, at the same time, this property can make the system less controllable and predictable for the user, which could cause confusion.

7.4.4 Multimodal Adaptive Interfaces One solution to the challenge of computer systems becoming more and more complex and with more interaction consists of making computer systems easier to use and learn. One way of doing this is through research into and the development of more intelligent interfaces that are adapted to the user in a natural and progressive way, trying to detect their characteristics so that the system can adapt to their level and preferences. The premise must be that the interfaces adapt to the person, not vice versa. An adaptive interface has the capacity to adapt to the user automatically, based on suppositions. It must not be confused with adaptable interfaces, which are those that simply allow the user to modify the parameters of the system to adapt to the user’s behaviour. Adaptable interfaces are more suitable in critical or very complex environments in which it is preferable to leave the decision making on how to configure the interface in the hands of the user (Miller, 2005). The key concept of this type of interface is the “user model”, aiming to synthesise the characteristics and skills of a group of people to facilitate and improve their interaction with the system. Its adaptability is achieved by interpreting the actions of the users, according to their options and the dialogue records with the system and generating responding at both the logical and physical level. The process is not simple: the “average user” does not exist, the knowledge of the user is not static and is not possible to create precise models. There are currently several approximations relative to the design of adaptive user interfaces. An example is that adopted by the Spanish INREDIS project14 which proposes the creation of adaptive accessible models for people with a disability by modelling the different aspects of the domain with which the user interacts by means of ontologies that model respectively the skills and characteristics of the user (User Ontology), the characteristics of the services (Ontology Target) and the information relative to the devices that the users use to interact with the system (User Device Ontology). The need for adaptive systems derives from the first instance of the heterogeneity of the user population. In the face of achieving a sufficient dynamism and facilitating the total integration of people with disabilities, a suitable technological infrastructure

14  http://www.inredis.es



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is necessary that monitors and sustains the different tasks that the disabled user has to tackle in the context of the use of computer environments.

7.4.5 Accessibility Standards for Learner Profiling Some standards have been defined to profile learner preferences and needs that will help the user to personalise devices and services for students with disabilities. Groups that have been really active in this work are: –– IMS Global Learning Consortium developing the IMS Learner Information Profile (IMS LIP) and IMS Learner Information Package Accessibility for LIP (ACCLIP) –– ISO developing the ISO/IEC 24751:2008 accessibility standards With all these standards, learners can specify which kind of adapted and/or alternative resource they prefer or need. For instance, text may be preferred over visual resources or audio might be preferred over text or images, etc. The IMS Global Learning Consortium has developed a specification that attempts to address learner profiling, the IMS Learner Information Profile (IMS LIP), devoted to describing general learner characteristics, by defining a set of packages that can be used to import data into and extract data from an IMS compliant Learner Information server. The IMS Learner Information Package Accessibility for LIP (ACCLIP) is that subset of IMS LIP which lets learners specify accessibility preferences and accommodations in terms of visual, aural or device. This profile provides a means of describing how learners interact with an eLearning environment, by focusing on accessibility requirements, therefore the user’s set of preferences can be exploited according to the different contexts of use of the eLearning environment, customizing the visualization of the learning contents, selecting the preferred input or output device, etc. In 2009, a new version of ACCLIP was released, called “Access-For-All Personal Needs and Preferences for Digital Delivery”. Accessibility user preferences in the IMS standards can be grouped as follows: –– Display information: this set describes the user preferences to have information displayed or presented. For example, it is possible to define preferences related to text (fonts and colors), video (resolution), mouse (pointer, motion), etc. –– Control information: this set defines the user preferences to control the device: keyboard (virtual), zoom preferences, voice recognition. –– Content information: this set defines the user preferences to visualize learning content. –– Privacy and data protection information: each ACCLIP element has meta-data sub-elements related to this information. The privacy and the data integrity is considered very important, since the exchanged information can be closely related to the user’s disabilities.

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While the IMS standard is focused on defining content characteristics, ISO specifies the senses through which content is accessed. The second part of the ISO/IEC 24751:2008 accessibility standards (Information technology–Individualized adaptability and accessibility in eLearning, education and training–Part 2: “Access for all” personal needs and preferences for digital delivery) is devoted to describing the learners’ Personal Needs and Preferences (ISO PNP). But according to the standards, learners can explicitly declare only one alternative access mode for each form of learning resource and it does not allow a change: for example, a blind user might prefer audio description but if such alternatives are absent, he/she cannot choose a text description instead. Therefore a new standard IMS Access for All (AfA) Personal Needs and Preferences (PNP) 3.0 has recently been developed, aiming to solve this type of problems and letting the learner specify multiple adaptation requests for each existing AccessMode. But still, IMS AfA PNP has some restrictions while choosing the size or quality of video and audio resources. For instance, it is not possible to request a lower version of a videoclip or audio file to be adapted to the user’s device. Therefore, a specific quality profile for learning resources would be desirable as well as clarification rules to better describe the list of alternative choices (e.g. ordered list of desirable content formats).

7.4.6 User Experience and User-Centred Design Model Early adopters of innovative products and services are usually so excited with the new products that they will probably manage to use them despite their User eXperience issues. The problem starts when these innovative products succeed and want to move from early adopters to mainstream users, which are less permissive with respect to poor usability. At this point, having a product that is useful and meaningful is suddenly not enough. It has to be intuitive and enjoyable to use in order to be successful. Regardless of possible platform User eXperience improvements, though, universities, professors and instructional designers will always have the last word on shaping the user experience of their courses. How they organize the content, how they label the menu sections or how they structure the different pages is absolutely crucial. And for these decisions, one should consider human-computer interaction guidelines, usability best practices or recommendations for writing usable online texts. The User Centered Design Model (UCDM) (Kinzie, 2002) means not only planning learning goals and actions, but also specifying different contexts of use and the requirements of different ‘actors’, which might include teachers, students, etc. In MOOC contexts, user centered design and user-centered evaluation have been driven by the concept of ‘task’. The student needs to be able to perform tasks such as studying course materials, taking notes, watching videos, writing assignments, accessing forum or chats, communicating with a curator, etc.

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However, the process of learning is not always easily broken down into sequential activities and something like ‘studying course materials’ can be a very complex task depending how the materials might be studied. Therefore, conventional approaches to usability tend to be limited to metrics pertaining to the time taken to complete a task, effort required, output, flexibility, and the user’s attitude. In contrast, some authors have attempted to overcome this by combining technical usability criteria (such as accessibility, consistency or reliability) with pedagogical usability components such as learner control, learner activity, motivation and feedback. Kukulska-Hulme and Shield (2004) have also argued that usability needs to be understood differently when it is being evaluated in the context of teaching and learning, and that the concept of pedagogical usability can be helpful as a means of focusing on the close relationship between usability and pedagogical design.

7.5 Conclusion Attending learning institutions in terms of travel, accommodation, physical access and availability of assistive technologies are all barriers to the acquisition of traditional learning for some people with disabilities. Overcoming the physical location and access issues gives rise to a solution for fully inclusive education options for disabled learners. How eLearning systems are designed, how their interfaces function, how communication is handled, how assessments take place and what form the learning content takes all impact on the accessibility of these system by students with disabilities. For web citizens with special needs, the ability to enrol in freely available MOOC courseware could be a viable first entry into tertiary level education or training. The challenge for the MOOC concept, then, is one of accessibility in terms of the community with whom it wishes to engage, ensuring that processes such as enrolling in a course, navigating the system, accessing learning materials and interacting with their peers is achievable through the use of assistive technologies. However, the problem still remains that the successful development of MOOCsbased learning is highly dependent on human interaction and their digital skills in the use of the platform, the multimedia content and social technologies. The majority of learning activities undertaken continues to take place using some hardware/ software that was not designed for its specific use with educational applications and, hence, usability issues often arise. Moreover, there are technical problems or incompatibility, when it is not possible to have the required technology, or it is not possible to obtain materials in alternative formats. In MOOCs, learning activities are used that had been originally designed neither for specific MOOC platforms nor for a specific learning scenario. Therefore, educational resources that are being delivered present some problems for certain target groups, such as people with complex communication needs or disabled users. As a

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result, the level of usability and/or accessibility of these resources is often lower than desired. This is a clear setback if they are to be used at a greater scale for inclusive learning. Therefore some proposed accessible features for MOOC platforms are listed below: –– Different themes should be available so as to invite users to choose the interface layouts which best meets their needs. –– The MOOC platform should be compliant with accessibility standards, not only related to the Web interface (i.e. the IMS/ISO AccessForAll, so as to support learners in configuring the environment and the learning content according to their needs and preferences). –– The MOOC platform should also address the accessibility from an instructor’s point of view, not only from student’s. It should let people with disabilities perform academic profiles in MOOCs such as digital facilitators and content curators. Although the usual accessibility barriers may exist in MOOC platforms, perhaps the model of large scale participation and social accessibility (Takagi et al., 2008) could be used to support special needs users by providing peer assistance in terms of study skills, content adaption and remote assistance. If enough interaction between users exists, students within the system can learn from their fellow students and make a contribution by assisting their peers. In the end, resources can be media-enriched, achieving a greater level of quality: transcriptions for mind mapping, audio recordings for podcasting, etc. All resources grouped together into learning resource collections that will benefit the all of the students in the MOOCs and the variety of the ubiquitous process.

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De Waard, I., Abajian, S., Gallagher, M. S., Hogue, R., Keskin, N., Koutropoulos,A., & Rodriguez, O. C. (2011). Using mLearning and MOOCs to understand chaos, emergence, and complexity in education. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(7), 94-115. De Waard I., Gallagher M.S., Zelezny-Green R., Czerniewicz L., Downes S., Kukulska-Hulme A. & Willems J.; (2014) Challenges for conceptualising EU MOOC for vulnerable learner groups. Proceedings of the eMOOCs 2014 Conference. Edited by P.A.U. Education (Laussane, Switzerland), 33-42. Dobransky, K., & Hargittai, E. (2006). The disability divide in Internet access and use. Information, Communication & Society, 9(3), 313-334. eInclusion Europe: Retrieved March 24, 2014, from European Commission Web site on Accessibility and Inclusion: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/einclusion/index_en.htm Gaebler, M. (2014). MOOCs Massive open online courses. EUA paper. Retrieved March 10, 2014, from European Universiy Association Web site: http://www.eua.be/Libraries/Publication/MOOCs_ Update_January_2014.sflb.ashx, 2014. Haggard, S. (2013). Massive open online courses and online distance learning: review. GOV. UK Research and analysis. Retrieved March 10, 2014, from Web site: https:// www.gov.uk/ government/publications/massive-open-online- courses-and-online-distance-learning-review i Díaz, M. P., & Bonjoch, M. R. (2007). ¿ Y después del trabajo, qué?: más allá de la integración laboral de las personas con discapacidad. Revista de Educación, (342), 329-348. Iniesto, F., Rodrigo, C. & Moreira, A. (2014). Accessibility analysis in MOOC platforms. A study case: UNED COMA and UAb iMooc. 2014 International Workshop MOOC2014 (accepted for publication) Jäppinen, A., Ahonen, M., Vainio, T., & Tanhua-Piiroinen, E. (2005). Adaptive Mobile Learning Systems: The essential issues from the design perspective. In J. Attewell & C. Savill-Smith (Eds.) Mobile Learning Anytime Everywhere – a book of papers from MLEARN 2004 (pp. 109-111). London: LSDA. 109-111 Kinzie, M., Cohn, W., Julian, M., Knaus & W. (2002). A User-centered Model for Web Site Design. Needs Assessment, User Interface Design, and Rapid Prototyping. J Am Med Inform Assoc; 9:320-330. Koon, R., & De la Vega, M. E. (2000). El impacto tecnológico en las personas con discapacidad. In II Congreso Iberoamericano de Informática Educativa Especial, Córdoba. Kop, R., & Bouchard, P. (2011). The role of adult educators in the age of social media. Digital education: Opportunities for social collaboration, 61-80. Kukulska-Hulme, A., & Shield, L. (2004). Usability and Pedagogical Design: Are language learning websites special? Paper presented at ED-MEDIA 2004 World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications. June 22-26. Lugano, Switzerland. Retrieved February 14, 2007 from Web site: http://www.aace.org/DL/index.cfm?fuseaction=ViewP aper&id=16072. Kukulska-Hulme, A. & Jones, C. (2011). The next generation: design and the infrastructure for learning in a mobile and networked world. In: Olofsson, A. D. and Lindberg, J. Ola (Eds.). Informed Design of Educational Technologies in Higher Education: Enhanced Learning and Teaching. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference (an Imprint of IGI Global), 57–78. Miller, C., Funk, H., Goldman, R., Meisner, J., & Wu, P. (2005). Implications of Adaptive vs. Adaptable UIs on Decision Making: Why “Automated Adaptiveness” is Not Always the Right Answer. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Augmented Cognition, Las Vegas, NV; 22-27. McGill, L. (2010). Open Educational Resources kit. Retrieved from Web site: https://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com/w/page/25168957/Overcoming%20barriers%20and%20finding%20 enablersOECD

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Inma Álvarez

8 Ethical and Aesthetic Considerations in Language Moocs Abstract: This chapter focuses on critical aspects, not usually discussed, in the field of language education. Its main purpose is to examine the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of language education in the context of eLearning, in particular in global learning via MOOCs. The literature on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) has highlighted how the new learning environments and tools have provided great opportunities as well as new challenges for language teaching and learning, but it has been less explicit about how these technologies, virtual environments and modes of computer mediated communication have impacted the ethics and aesthetics of language education. Here I consider how the context, the content, the medium and the agents involved in education can be approached from an ethical and aesthetic perspective, and the reasons why these considerations are important for our language programmes. Keywords: ethics, aesthetics, MOOCs, language education, eLearning, intercultural communication

8.1 Introduction Language learning is mainly about discovering ways to engage in communication with others. It is learning to interact through evolving words, signs and accents in cross-cultural encounters. At present language teaching and learning are dynamic activities which occur in real and virtual worlds. Formal and informal online language education is rapidly moving towards high levels of participation supported by a range of technologies. While much of the attention has been focused on design functionality in order to enhance the learning experience, no mention is made to the “various practical experiences through which aesthetic awareness and ethical expectations are expressed” (Nadin, 2010, p. 111). In this chapter, I will focus on the connections between ethics, aesthetics and language education15 in the digital era. Firstly, I will consider some of the specific ethical

15  I will refer here to language education, foreign language education and second language education as meaning the same, i.e. being educated in a language that is not your mother tongue. The concept, as it will be used here, also encapsulates the idea of culture as an intrinsic part of language education. © 2014 Inma Álvarez This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License

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and aesthetics issues that emerge in the various aspects of language education and, in particular, those that arise by using Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Secondly, I will examine the ethical aspirations of the supporters of openness and open initiatives, including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and some of the educational debates around them. Thirdly, I will evaluate the extent to which MOOCs could enhance or inhibit the ethics and aesthetics of language education.

8.2 Ethics and Aesthetics in Language Education Ethics and aesthetics permeate all realms of our lives, including our learning experiences. Ethics is the sphere that reasons about the appropriateness of actions in terms of being right or wrong, and this is connected to specific moral values and actions as well as the issues around them. Traditionally, aesthetics has been concerned with the experience of beauty, the capacity to produce pleasure and the properties of artworks. However, during the 20th century the aesthetic inquiry expanded from philosophy of art to anthropology and sociology shifting our aesthetic thinking towards other artificial and natural domains, emphasising the role of the agent as observer/user in everyday activities, and embracing a wider range of feelings and experiences, including negative ones. Ethics and aesthetics are interlinked, both are innate to human beings but, in the main, they require conceptual reasoning. Philosophers have highlighted the fact that aesthetic categories and ideas can raise ethical concerns, and vice versa, that our moral values have an impact on our aesthetic experiences. An example of how our aesthetic judgment can be influenced by personal beliefs and moral values is that we could find an image morally inacceptable and, therefore, not be able to enjoy any aspects of what it represents and how it is represented, even if its production required high skills, creativity and artistry. During the 90s, a few educationists noted how these dimensions were systematically ignored within the field of Education. Hogan (1998) alerted us to the fact that education policy in Europe had forgotten to refer to moral purposes focusing on performance, markets, excellence, and individualism. At the same time, Foshay (1991) complained that “[t]he research literature on aesthetics in education continues to be scarce and generally of mediocre quality” (p. 279). Unfortunately, it is still uncommon to acknowledge and research these aspects of education, particularly issues of aesthetic relevance. As we will see, various movements in Education have helped to bring back an ethical dimension to language curriculum in the past few decades. However, an aesthetic perspective has not been consolidated in this field despite its tight connections with ethical approaches, morals and values.



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8.2.1 The Intercultural Agenda and Beyond Theories of interculturality in language teaching and learning have contributed, not only to the discussion of attitudes, skills, knowledge and political and critical cultural awareness in communicative encounters across cultures (Byram, Gribkova, & Starkey, 2002), but they have also emphasized the teaching of language as social interaction (Scollon & Scollon, 2000). In addition, they have highlighted the importance of developing a predisposition to deal with the unpredictable situations that come up in our encounters with others, as well as in encounters with our own beliefs and values. The intercultural pedagogical approaches have, thus, pushed for the explicit development of complex ethical skills with the support of appropriate activities and cultural content in the language classroom. The connection between education and moral considerations became further strengthened with respect to the people involved with the introduction of widening participation agenda in Europe. Overall, this agenda is concerned with accessibility, availability, acceptability and affordability of Higher Education. In England, according to the Higher Education Council (2014), it means that there is an explicit commitment to promoting inclusion, equality and diversity through the curriculum on offer, the assessment tasks, the learning experience and our teaching practices. The following words of advice to language teachers illustrate practical approaches to those aims: All aspects of the plan will need to be underpinned by an understanding of the particular needs of the group and ideally of the linguistic and skills needs of the individuals within it. It should also take account of ethical considerations such as ensuring that no task is threatening to learners, make anyone uncomfortable, has the potential to develop in a direction that would be unwelcome or provoke any sort of hostility or problems for cultural or personal reasons. It should also take into account issues related to disability which arise in the specific mode concerned. Parts of the blend [delivery of courses] may be more accessible to some learners than to others and, where choice is possible, this can be taken into account in deciding which mode to use. (Nicolson, Southgate & Murphy, 2011, p. 97)

Nowadays, being ethical from a language educator perspective means being aware of a range of abilities, recognizing different sets of values, encouraging moral reasoning, questioning practices as well as acknowledging and representing linguistic and cultural variation. This also applies to the educational content, context and medium because what is taught, where, when and how it is taught needs to reflect those ethical practices and values. The implications are, however, different for the learner community; for them, ethical issues relate mainly to the responsibility and authenticity of their participation, their work and their interaction in their studies. For instance, Higher Education is today sensitive to issues around academic misconduct and plagiarism which relate to students’ academic honesty around other people’s and their own creative contributions. Therefore, all those aspects of education —the content,

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the context, the medium and the agents— are subject to ethical considerations which, inevitably, will refer back to other remote agents who shaped them, that is, book writers and editors, policy makers, ICT designers, etc. Having noted some ethical aspects related to foreign language education, we can proceed to ask: what would count as an aesthetic perspective in this field?

8.2.2 Languages and Aesthetic Sensibilities On one level, an aesthetic view in language teaching and learning would imply the use of a pedagogical approach that focuses on the development of both an emotional and reasoned response to the qualities of languages. The approach would foster the appreciation of the target language in its diverse registers and varieties based on a set of criteria (e.g. value, beauty, usefulness, efficiency) in a range of historical and creative contexts. The content of language education could be reshaped not only as an aesthetic way of knowing and judging but also as an aesthetic way of interacting with and adapting to other ways of being and behaving. From a cognitivist stance, the aforementioned intercultural perspective in the theory of language learning has noted that enculturation processes impact on our aesthetic concepts. This view claims that “[p]art of what’s involved in speaking aesthetically is to belong to a cultural practice of making sense of things aesthetically. And it is within a socio-linguistic community, along with that community’s practices, that such aesthetic sense can be made intelligible” (Croom, 2012, p. 114). I would argue that by engaging learners in language interaction in diverse contexts, modes and environments, language programmes could focus on the pleasure of cultural transformations, the joys that come from knowing about others and about ourselves, the development of critical senses, and the beauty and value of languages and their respective communities. Moreover, all these aesthetic approaches to languages would clearly stretch to the realm of ethics. Some of John Macmurray’s ideas on education come to mind. Macmurray (2012) has explained that the cultivation of our sensibility and emotions means treating our senses rather than as means as “ends in themselves” (p.671), and being able to enjoy what we perceive around us through emotional reflection. He pleads for an educational system based on “learning to be human”. This humanistic approach is key to the field of Languages because it is based on human perception, communication and interaction. Macmurray (2012) believes, on the one hand, that “our ability to enter into fully personal relations with others is the measure of our humanity” (p. 670). On the other hand, he argues for “learning to live in our senses”, thus establishing a direct connection between our ethical and aesthetic development. In the context of formal education, this agenda could be translated as follows. Language students could be offered an education that makes them aware of how language choices reveal moral and aesthetic perspectives, or how successful social interaction with others



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depends on their behaviour. Awareness should be emphasized, not only as regards the role of their linguistic skills, but also their cultural attitudes and values. In fact, language education could go beyond awareness and reflection of identity formation and the impact of culture by building on students’ perceptions and knowledge of the world, as well as their interpersonal intercultural skills.

8.3 Challenges and Possibilities in the Digital Era Nowadays when we talk about education, it is inevitable to refer to ICT which mediates new ways of learning inside and outside the classroom. It has been suggested that this situation has created different types of interactivity, and hence meaning, between teachers, students and the content of their programmes via the World Wide Web (Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.1: Educational interactions on the Semantic Web (Anderson, 2004)

Thus, Internet based education, whether synchronous or asynchronous, collaborative or independent, adds another qualitative layer to the context, content, medium and people involved in teaching and learning because it presents a unique and evolving context for agent interaction. This, in turn, shapes that context and creates new ones. I am particularly interested in the fact that technologies and their designs are not neutral; they embed human, cultural and social values (Manders-Huits, 2011;

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Tripathy, 2010), and are utilized with those kinds of values by all of us. I propose we should pay attention to the ethical and aesthetic dimensions that come within the rich virtual environments, communication tools, simulations, games, social media and digital objects, but also to those that teachers and learners create or encounter, use and share in online interaction. ELearning brings up particular issues not only of design and communication but also of instructional ethics and aesthetics. It is my contention, however, that we should not limit ourselves to theoretical debates but we should also integrate explicitly critical ethical and aesthetic perspectives in the language curriculum. In fact, these perspectives could be easily linked to current educational trends that advice language students’ development of digital literacy, professional skills, and interculturality.

8.3.1 New Ethical and Aesthetic Considerations I will start considering some of the specific ethical issues that the literature has mentioned with respect to the use of ICT. These issues range from users’ behaviour online to specific value aspects of the technological design. Although a few years ago there were complains about the lack of research on ethics in online education (Brown, 2008; Wang & Heffernan, 2010), attention to computer and information ethics has been growing rapidly. A computer code of ethics guides people about being and behaving morally responsible in specific virtual environments. In particular, in the context of eLearning, Khan (2005) enumerated eight ethical considerations: social and political influence, cultural diversity, bias, geographical diversity, learner diversity, digital divide, etiquette, and legal issues (Khan, 2005, p. 15). In reality, all of these considerations are not exclusive of eLearning, but they also apply to the ethics of learning in general, with the exception of the digital divide which I will discuss later. It is true, however, that, in the context of eLearning, they are inevitably framed in slightly different terms; for instance, in eLearning, netiquette, or network etiquette, focuses on defining a set of social rules or norms on how to behave appropriately in online communication. These norms are naturally based on conventions used for face to face encounters but, in addition, they consider the reasons why humans might feel inclined to behave differently (well or badly) when there is a distance between the exchanging agents. Also, with respect to cultural and learner diversity, it has been pointed out that online learning presents specific ethical challenges to teachers such as the difficulties that arise in the absence of body language and other paralinguistic clues: “student preconditions and cultural prerequisites are often more difficult in an online learning context, because teachers are less able to interact transparently with students” (Anderson, 2004). Other general ethical discussions have centred around the moral values hidden in technology design and the impact that design choices have on our lives (Verbeek, 2006). For instance, Manders-Huits (2011) has spoken on the importance of attempting



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Value-Sensitive Design, which considers human and moral values around the technological products and people who would be involved with them. She argues that “[a] technology that is introduced in two or more cultures with different conceptions of a value affects the moral emotions regarding the technology, including its uses and consequences, in different ways” (Manders-Huits, 2011, p. 282). For education, this means that teachers and learners’ emotional responses to technology are directly linked to their cultural background and, therefore, it needs to be taken into account in the ways we design educational technology. Let’s now move on to consider some aesthetic concerns that new technologies bring to education. A decade ago, Tractinsky (2004) suggested that the study of aesthetics in relation to technology is important for a number of reasons: it enhances the users’ experience of IT, there is strong evidence about the immediacy of our first aesthetic impression of an experience, it gives us attention to pleasure which has intrinsic human value, and also because the more aesthetically aware people become, the greater their need for aesthetics (Tractinsky, 2004). Mentions in the literature of an aesthetic dimension in technology are so far predominantly of a pragmatic nature. Scholars like Cocchiarella (2012) have indicated that, unfortunately, current discourses about technologies concentrate “more on technical facts than on aesthetics or philosophical values” (p. 1). The scarce interest has come from businesses who have been indeed interested in design aesthetics. This branch of aesthetic thinking examines the usefulness, attractiveness and ease of use of a website or software, aspects that are crucial to build trust from customers (Li & Yeh, 2010). Although these aspects could also be relevant for educational design, in our context, it is not only of interest the interaction between an individual and the technology, but also the aesthetic processes that take place online between the three agents previously mentioned: students, teachers and content.

8.3.2 Languages in ELearning Environments The ethical and aesthetic significance of ICT in our field concerns how the educational system applies those technologies for educating language learners in ways that contribute to the development of their attitudes and sensibilities. This is related, for instance, to aesthetic engagement and appreciation of the concealed qualities or patterns of the learning content (languages, cultures and products) within the medium of ICT, and the aesthetic and ethical criteria for judging that content, but it also concerns how the use of ICT for language teaching leads educators to rethink their attitudes and sensibilities as well. Attention to these factors forces ultimately the reconfiguration of roles, expectations and cultural repertoires. Language learning research has been quite alert in particular to ethical implications of the use of innovative technologies. Researchers in the field of

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Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) have asked and examined contextual questions such as: What are the major ethical issues in current CALL settings? What are the perceptions of CALL teachers and learners towards ethical issues such as privacy and online security? What are their ethical concerns in online language learning? What are the ideal solutions to the ethical problems for teachers in CALL practice? (Wang & Heffernan, 2010, p. 797)

Others have reflected on the ethical and aesthetic potential of the emerging social relations via new communication technologies. Cimini and Burr (2012), inspired by the theories of Jürgen Habermas and Mikhail Bakhtin, have pointed out the emancipatory potential of open online deliberations which are different to other conventional face-to-face methods. They explain that the electronic interface facilitates the manipulation of virtual personae and lead to “relatively more self-aggrandizing behaviours and deliberately provocative methods of argumentation” (p. 59), a moral inclination very much criticised by many with respect to online interaction. However, they also argue that these irrational discursive behaviours, plagued with emotions and personal bias, are not necessarily problematic. On the contrary, they suggest that these factors could, in fact, get articulated in linguistic exchanges that help a common social construction of meanings and knowledge among very different agents. In this context they have referred to an emergent “aesthetic for democracy”. Such an aesthetic would be a “model for egalitarian social relations that is open, is inclusive, and takes strength from, or strives toward, universalism” (Cimini & Burr, 2012, p. 153). Therefore, an aesthetic that touches onto the ethical. These ideas about the ethical and aesthetic possibilities afforded by virtual contexts and mediums clearly connect with the ethical principles of the widening participation initiative for Education. They also support, as will be seen now, the ethical agenda of the open initiatives which have been revolutionizing the educational landscape in the past few years.

8.4 Openness and Open Initiatives’ Ethical Agenda The concepts of openness and open initiatives in relation to language education, on the one hand, refer implicitly to eLearning, that is, education through new technologies, and on the other hand, have an explicit ethical purpose.



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8.4.1 Opening to a Hyperdemocracy The concept of “openness” has a strong social significance linked to the concept of “hyperdemocracy”, which means sharing, participating and cooperating at a global scale: The concept of ‘Openness’ is based on the idea that knowledge should be disseminated and shared freely through the Internet for the benefit of society as a whole. The two most important aspects of openness are free availability and as few restrictions as possible on the use of the resource, whether technical, legal or price barriers (Yuan, MacNeill, & Kraan, 2009, p. 1)

Openness marks the will to reach wide to anyone who can be potentially reached. Therefore it encapsulates an ethical dimension connected to ideas of social justice, human rights, freedom and accessibility.

8.4.2 Open Initiatives The open initiatives phenomenon has taken off at great speed in the past couple of decades. It has been facilitated and supported since the late 1990s by the development of the new technologies which have revolutionized the way we function and communicate in the world. In fact, as early as 1983, the über-hacker, Richard Stallman, conceived the idea of copyleft (identifying it with the reverse symbol of copyright) and drafted the General Public License which would facilitate legal distribution, reproduction and adaptation of a work. Stallman (1998) declared moral mission in his actions: “My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better” (p. 93). This disruptive practice represented a revolutionary step in modern concepts of creation and authorship which would have enormous implications for the various open practices that followed around the world. Currently, open initiatives are a set of evolving practices embracing the concept of openness and encouraging the use of open licenses such as Creative Commons Licenses; therefore, they are motivated by an ethical agenda of sharing principles. These principles include the Open Source initiative that promotes the free publication of software source code, the Open Content initiative together with the philosophy of Open Education Practices (OEPs) that have inspired the production and sharing of Open Educational Resources (OERs), the move towards Open translation practices as well as the offering of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and the Open Access initiative which has pushed for Open-access publishing of scholarly and academic work.

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8.4.3 Addressing the Global Masses MOOCs are free online courses open to all that have been described as platforms (Siemens, 2012), events (Cornier, 2010), textbooks (Finegold cited in Young, 2013) and disruptive innovations (Bayne & Ross, 2014; Lawton & Katsomitros, 2012; Yuan & Powell, 2013). An important aspect of MOOCs is that they have not been born of institutional policies but rather of the initiatives of institutions and individuals wired to the open initiatives: The original aim of MOOCs was to open up education and provide free access to university level education for as many students as possible […] The development of MOOCs is rooted within the ideals of openness in education, that knowledge should be shared freely, and the desire to learn should be met without demographic, economic, and geographical constraints. (Yuan & Powell, 2013, p. 6).

These initial aspirations reflect a utilitarian approach in their wish to maximize the social impact of education. Others have indicated the importance of MOOCs for “empowering people to develop and create their own learning” (Downes, 2012), thus emphasizing what it is known as a learner-centred approach to education. However, these ideals are not free from ethical dangers. A number of problems have already been identified in the recent literature around MOOCs. These include, as we will now see, the use of MOOCs for commercial interests, the issue of the digital divide in terms of access to technology but also with respect to the level of digital literacy, as well as the linguistic and cultural challenges of addressing the world population. Firstly, the progressive transformation of higher education institutions into commercial enterprises has affected the original intentions behind the launching of MOOCs. Universities’ MOOC efforts have started to focus on the promotion of their institutional brands. In addition, interest has been building up with respect to financially viable and optimal business models that justify the use of MOOCs for ultimately profitable gains. This has led to two main commercial actions. On the one hand, free MOOCs have started to be employed as marketing tools in order to drive university recruitment at an international scale. Meanwhile, on the other hand, new fee-based models of MOOCs for accreditation via formal assessment have been born. These steps are gradually changing the initial ethical agenda of MOOCs. Secondly, the fact that open initiatives are inevitably mediated by technology immediately places them in the conflict of the digital divide. A few voices have argued that what MOOCs will not do is address the challenge of expanding higher education in the developing world (Bartholet, 2013; Bates, 2012). In many places around the globe, the technology is simply not there, neither in the society nor in the formal educational context. It is obvious that engagement with open practices requires access to the technology, and depending on what you wish or need to do for your course, it also requires knowledge on how to create digital resources and share your work. Hence, debates around the digital divide should not only refer to access to new technologies



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but also to users’ level of digital literacy. At present, participation in these initiatives becomes problematic for the great majority of people in the world as they assume digital literacy from the participants, not only in developing countries but also for people in the developed world. Lack of digital skills can have an impact not only on students’ participation but also on how well they are able to apply relevant academic norms. For instance, cheating is one ethical issue highlighted around student behaviour in MOOCs (Meyer & Zhu, 2013). However, some degree of digital literacy comes with access to the technology and opportunities to immerse oneself in a digital world where one can practice complex skills navigating and interacting online. To this respect, McAuley et al. (2010) have suggested that, in fact, MOOCs can potentially support people’s development of “relevant digital economy literacies in a fast capital-mentored-learning environment” (p. 33). Indeed, one could see how MOOCs, among all the possible virtual learning spaces, offer world learners a kind of sandpit for testing, experimenting and peer-support within a shared knowledge area. Thus, it could be argued that through digital autonomous and participatory practices, MOOCs potentially offer opportunities for the development of digital literacy. Thirdly, another point worth highlighting is that education in mass at a global scale via MOOCs is confronted with similar ethical challenges as the internationalization of universities, that is, issues of language and cultural differences, and in relation to these, issues related to expectations. For Harri (2009) there are two major language and culture related issues we cannot ignore. On the one hand, she denounces the global imposition of English as the technical vehicle of education, and on the other hand, the mono-lingualism of the political discourse which refers to “a blindness to difference, to what is other and to what is incommensurable” (p. 226). Indeed, the large MOOC platform providers have been repeatedly accused of claiming superior knowledge and of not contemplating the cultural challenges in their educational models, therefore practicing yet another form of cultural imperialism (Beasley-Murray, 2013; Portmess, 2013). There have also been specific warnings about the fact that in different parts of the world the ethical standards of learning behaviour online are not the same (Wang & Heffernan, 2010). The challenge here is that educators aiming globally should be aware of the linguistic and cultural difficulties that arise from addressing a diverse student population in open online education. By contrast, no in-depth references have been made with respect to an aesthetic approach to MOOCs. We know that we have an innate readiness for aesthetic sensory experiences of the world which is subsequently shaped by cultural knowledge and values. These aesthetic frames of reference influence our experiences of the educational context, medium, content and agents. Aesthetic discourses around MOOCs would focus on issues such as MOOC platforms’ design aesthetics, enjoyment of democratic interactive processes, and appreciation of subject content. A key question is about the real extent of the realisation of universality and whether successful massive learning is possible at all. That would presuppose that some level of ethics and aesthetic approaches are sharable, or at least negotiable.

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To this regard, not enough debate has taken place yet. Grover et al. (2013) have indicated that one aspiration should be to figure out MOOCs that cater for a large number of diverse participants, but others have argued that open content cannot be simply offered in one form. They suggest that it needs to be localised and translated and, in fact, that language MOOCs themselves could be a means to make people aware of this need and achieve it in the end (Beaven et al., 2013). To sum up, reaching out potentially to anyone around the world demands educational development and practices that attend to diverse moral and aesthetic values with respect to the content and medium. For these reason, in the context of massive education online, we need to devise solutions that help us overcome these issues, which not only threaten the ethical democratic aspiration of openness but also the appropriate appreciation and exchange of diverse aesthetic values.

8.5 Languaging in MOOCS As it has been emphasised so far, many design, contextual, instructional, and interactive aspects of online language education are subject to moral and aesthetic evaluations and influences but not much attention has been focused on them. If these dimensions are to be integrated, designers and teachers of language MOOCs need the support of educational theories as well as specific findings from empirical research. The platform design, curriculum and instruction in language MOOCs could aim at making this visible in ways that fulfil some of the most crucial learning objectives of language education today. To date, only a handful of language MOOCs have been offered, and most of them focus on the development of a basic level of the target language. Language education could take advantage of the global scale of MOOCs as an opportunity to move away from conceptions of language learning as a simple acquisition of skills and aim to explore a range of human values and fundamental principles of intercultural relations. MOOCs could be seen as a unique platform to foster what Phipps and González (2004) have called “languaging,” that is, a practice of languages that embraces reflective approaches, intercultural understanding and diverse values. Languaging refers to a self-changing experience of embodied knowledge and creative social interaction. Theirs is an invitation to reframe language education and focus on students’ embodiment and engagement with words and cultures. As they explain, “[t]hrough languaging they become active agents in creating their human and material environments” (Phipps & Gonzalez, 2004, p. 167). These thoughts on language learning before the explosion of massive education can be linked to discourses around communities of practice which emphasise the social aspect of languaging experiences. They provide an inspiring model of “learning citizenship” which is about ethical investment of our identity in social systems (Wenger, 2012, p. 14).



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These theories coincide with MOOC initiatives in that they both move education away from models of external control and arbitration of achievement. They propose the decentralisation of the traditional educative control in order to facilitate active and creative participation of agents around the globe in the shaping of new contexts. MOOCs are not in themselves teaching methods nor are they simply self-learning environments. They are localised educational spaces, culture-based platforms, which allow multiple creative and reflective processes, both personal and social. In MOOCs, pedagogy is emergent from the dynamics between the context, the content, the people and the medium, rather than something that is simply embedded in the technical build (Bayne & Ross, 2014). Language MOOCs, in particular, could aim at facilitating positive engagement among participants in the articulation and embodiment of real and virtual linguistic and cultural meanings.

8.6 Conclusions: Researching for the Future It has been my contention here that language education would benefit from the study of ethical and aesthetic aspects that are still unexplored. These aspects are of particular relevance in the context of current innovative global education online. As MOOCs are an extremely new educational phenomenon, there are very limited theoretical reflections and empirical studies on their nature, aims, effectiveness, accessibility, and so forth. It is also still the case that most investigations to date on actual MOOCs come from the designers or teachers who have been in charge of delivering them. The scarce research literature on MOOCs has been either focusing on reporting on basic design and content, and student attrition and participation, or on limited theoretical aspects of the pedagogical approach, the quality of the content, the financial models and implications, and the technology involved. In addition, latest research has increasingly focused on the importance of constructing new models of research ethics that look into practices of research decisions and data collection with respect to online learning contexts. A review of the literature from 2008 to 2011 indicates eight main emerging themes covered by published articles during that period: agency, connectivism, actor network theory, dangers, learner experience, pedagogies, technology, and trends (Liyanagunawardena, Adams, & Williams, 2013). It is evident that studies on many of the multiple aspects involved in learning via MOOCs have not taken place yet. The most recent report from the Higher Education Academy on MOOCs has highlighted, for instance, that teachers’ approaches and reasons for teaching a MOOC are varied and under researched (Bayne & Ross, 2014). As it has been noted here, similarly, the range of and connections between ethical and aesthetic issues with respect to language MOOCs is another area that could be further researched in the future. The next few years will be crucial for experimenting with MOOCs. Studies around these experiences should lead to new insights about

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the potential and the challenges of teaching and learning languages massively at a global scale. Research in the areas proposed in this chapter will aim at understanding how we can support massive online language education with appropriate digital designs, methods and content that are accessible, representative, safe, meaningful, and motivating. If we achieve all these, MOOCs will be adding a huge value to global language education in the 21st century.

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Foshay, A. W. (1991). The curriculum matrix: Transcendence and mathematics. Journal of Curriculum & Supervision, 6(4), 277-293. Grover, S., Franz, P., Schneider, E., & Pea, R. (Eds.). (2013). The MOOC as distributed intelligence: dimensions of a framework & evaluation of MOOCs. Madison. Retrieved March 31, 2014, from Standford University http://lytics.stanford.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/ Framework-for-Design-Evaluation-of-MOOCs-Grover-Franz-Schneider-Pea_final.pdf Harri, S. (2009). Translation, internationalisation and the university. London Review of Education, 7(3), 223-233. Hogan, P. (1998). Europe and the world of learning: orthodoxy and aspiration in the wake of modernity. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 32(3), 361-376. Khan, B. (2005). Managing E-Learning Strategies: Design, Delivery, Implementation and Evaluation. London: Information Science Publishing. Lawton, W., & Katsomitros, A. (2012). MOOCs and disruptive innovation: The challenge to HE business models: The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education. Li, Y.-M., & Yeh, Y.-S. (2010). Increasing trust in mobile commerce through design aesthetics. Computers in Human Behavior, 26(4), 673-684. Liyanagunawardena, T. R., Adams, A. A., & Williams, S. A. (2013). MOOCs: A systematic study of the published literature 2008-2012. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 14(3). Macmurray, J. (2012). Learning to be Human. Oxford Review of Education, 38(6), 661-674. Manders-Huits, N. (2011). What values in design? the challenge of incorporating moral values into design. Science and Engineering Ethics, 17, 271-287. McAuley, A., Stewart, B., Siemens, G., & Cornier, D. (2010). The MOOC model for digital practice. elearnspace. Everything elearning Retrieved March 31, 2014, from University of Prince Edward Island webpage: http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/MOOC_Final.pdf Meyer, J. P., & Zhu, S. (2013). Fair and equitable measurement of student learning in MOOCs: An introduction to item response theory, scale linking, and score equating. Research and Practice in Assessment, 8, 26-39. Nadin, M. (2010). Anticipation and the artificial: aesthetics, ethics, and synthetic life. Artificial Intelligence and Society, 25(1), 103-118. Nicolson, M., Southgate, & M. Murphy, L. (2011). Teaching in synchronous and asynchronous modes. In Nicolson, M., Murphy, L., & Southgate, M. (Eds.), Language teaching in blended contexts (pp. 95-111). Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press. Phipps, A., & Gonzalez, M. (2004). Modern languages. Learning and teaching in an intercultural field. London: Sage Publications. Portmess, L. (2013). Mobile knowledge, karma points and digital peers: the tacit epistemology and linguistic representation of MOOCs. Canadican Journal of Learning and Technology, 39(2). Retrieved March 31, 2014, from http://cjlt.csj.ualberta.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/view/705 Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2000). Intercultural communication: a discourse approach (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Siemens, G. (2012). MOOCs are really a platform. eLearnspace. Retrieved March 31, 2014, from http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/ Stallman, R. (1998). Copyleft: pragmatic idealism. In J. Gay (Ed.), Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (pp. 93-96). Boston: GNU Press. Tractinsky, N. (2004). Toward the study of aesthetics in information technology. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Conference on Information Systems, 11-20. Retrieved March 31, 2014, from http://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2004/ Tripathy, A. K. (2010). Ethics and aestheics of technologies. AI & Soc, 25, 5-9. Verbeek, P.-P. (2006). Persuasive technology and moral responsibility. Toward an ethical framework for persuasive technologies. Persuasive06, Eindhoven University of Technology. Retrieved

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Fernando Rubio

9 Teaching Pronunciation and Comprehensibility in a Language MOOC Abstract: This chapter reports on a study comparing the gains in comprehensibility of students enrolled in a traditional face-to-face (F2F) pronunciation course with those enrolled in a Language MOOC (LMOOC). The study analyzes potential correlations between types of feedback and pronunciation gains. The two courses followed a similar structure and had comparable goals, but differed crucially in the types and amount of feedback provided to learners. Students produced a sample of controlled speech at the beginning and the end of each course. The samples were judged by two native speakers that assigned them comprehensibility ratings. Results showed significant improvements in both course formats, but larger effect sizes in the case of the LMOOC. The findings are discussed taking into consideration the different affordances of the two learning formats. Keywords: MOOC, oral, feedback, pronunciation

9.1 Introduction Since their inception, and particularly with the increase in their popularity since 2011, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been touted by many as a disruptive force in education. The expectation, as Friedman (2012) put it, was that through MOOCs anyone with access to a computer and a fast Internet connection could enjoy the benefits of high quality education at almost no cost. The proliferation of free and massively enrolled courses offered by some of the world’s top universities brought increased media attention to MOOCs to the point where the New York Times declared 2012 the “Year of the MOOC” (Pappano, 2012). Our profession was initially very slow in embracing the concept of massive courses. The caveats were both intellectual and methodological. On the one hand, as members of the Humanities used to dealing with small groups of learners in brickand-mortar academic settings, many language teaching professionals were skeptical of the feasibility of engaging large numbers of students in effective learning experiences without the one-on-one and small-group types of human interaction that are typical of humanities disciplines. Marianne Hirsch, President of the Modern Language Association and professor of English at Columbia University, expressed this concern in a letter to the editor of the New York Times responding to a column on MOOCs published by Thomas Friedman: “If we want a better-educated global citizenry, should we not foster a multitude of professors with different views who can © 2014 Fernando Rubio This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License

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share deep critical thinking in a community of learners such as only the embodied experience of the classroom can yield [emphasis added]?” (Online Courses, 2013). The prevailing assumption in our field is still that face-to-face (F2F) teaching is the golden standard and anything other than traditional classroom teaching will result in an inferior experience for learners. But language-teaching professionals are more concerned about the practical and methodological implications of teaching language online to very large numbers of learners. If we accept the assumption that some of the crucial ingredients for language acquisition are ample opportunities to interact synchronously with other learners and with experts (native speakers or instructors) and, in the case of instructed learning, access to corrective feedback, the promise of scalability that is essential to the appeal of MOOCs runs counter to their plausibility as a valid format for language learning. A crucial question asked by many in our profession is whether Language MOOCs (LMOOCs) are a viable option when the goal of a course is to elicit ample oral production in the target language facilitated by frequent and targeted feedback. For example, courses that focus on improving pronunciation, like the ones described in this chapter, are not seen as the most logical candidates for success in this model. In order to advance our understanding of the potential or the limitations of LMOOCs, the present chapter reports on a study of comprehensibility and the role of feedback in oral production in the LMOOC “Improving your Spanish pronunciation”, taught between January and March of 2103. The study looks at the effectiveness of the LMOOC compared to a traditional F2F course by looking at the gains in comprehensibility experienced by students enrolled in both courses and analyzing the potential relationship between types of feedback and course effectiveness. The following sections provide an overview of relevant literature and a description of the methodology employed in the study.

9.2 The Role of Feedback Gass, Behny and Plonsky (2013) offer a good working definition of feedback as “An intervention that provides information to a learner that a prior utterance is correct or incorrect” (p. 524). Feedback has occupied a prominent role in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research for the past 40 years, especially following Hendrickson’s (1978) review of the issue of error correction in the classroom. The questions asked in the literature have to do with whether errors need to be corrected and, if so, which errors, by whom, when and how. There has been considerable discussion as to whether feedback or, at least, corrective feedback, is necessary for acquisition (Krashen, 1981; Truscott 1999). However, most research provides empirical evidence that in the case of adults and for certain features, being exposed to negative evidence



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is indeed essential for acquisition (see Loewen, 2012; Long, 2007 for detailed reviews of the issue). Perhaps more relevant to the study presented in this chapter is the discussion about how and when; that is, the specific qualities and contexts that make certain types of feedback more effective than others. Different types of feedback can vary in terms of their degree of explicitness. Explicit feedback provides an open signal that an error has been made, while implicit feedback does not. While some research points to the preponderance of implicit feedback in language classrooms and to its potential advantages as a non-intrusive method (Long, 1996; 2007), most of the literature emphasizes the advantages of explicit forms of feedback and often criticize the unsystematic and arbitrary nature of implicit approaches (Carroll, 2001; Ellis, 2007; Ellis, Loewen & Erlam, 2006; Lyster & Ranta, 1997; Spada & Lightbown, 1999).

9.2.1 Feedback and Pronunciation Instruction In the case of pronunciation instruction, the research on pedagogical approaches to date does not paint a clear picture. Typically, instruction in Phonetics in a Second Language (L2) context consists of a combination of explicit information about the L2’s phonological system—including the most salient differences between the First Language (L1) and the L2—ample opportunities to practice, and a good dose of feedback. Different approaches to instruction, with the resulting differences in types of feedback, seem to be effective depending on the context. For example, Celce–Murcia, Brinton, and Goodwin (1996) argue that an implicit instructional approach that focuses on imitation is more appropriate at lower levels of proficiency, while more explicit instruction that focuses on the analysis of phonological features may be more effective for learners at higher levels of proficiency. Some authors advocate for integrating pronunciation instruction into an overall communicative focus without making it a separate, explicit target of instruction (Isaacs, 2009), and other research suggests that instruction in L2 Phonetics does not have a positive effect on learners’ pronunciation (Kissling, 2013). However, still others argue that implicit instruction alone is not sufficient. For example, several recent studies (Chung, 2007; Dlaska & Krekeler, 2013; Saito & Lyster, 2012) have found that, in addition to implicit feedback, the presence of explicit, individualized corrective feedback has an added beneficial effect on the acquisition of pronunciation. In a study on the acquisition of the English retroflex /ɹ/ by Japanese speakers, Saito and Lyster (2012) found that those who received explicit individualized corrective feedback significantly outperformed those who did not. Dlaska and Krekeler (2013) studied the immediate effects of instruction on the level of comprehensibility of adult learners of German and found that those who had received individualized corrective feedback made significantly more improvements. As is frequently the case, the different research design and methodologies employed and the presence of potentially confounding variables makes it difficult

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to draw definitive conclusions from the existing research on pronunciation instruction. The mixed results may also have to do with the fact that the effectiveness of a teaching approach depends, in part, on the phonological feature being studied (see Kissling, 2013, for a review). Yet, there seems to be strong agreement that pronunciation instruction has a beneficial effect on adult learners’ comprehensibility, intelligibility and accentedness (de Bot & Mailfert, 1982; Kennedy, Blanchet & Trofimovich, 2014; Saito & Lyster, 2012; Trofimovich, Ammar & Gatbonton, 2008). The question that remains is exactly which components of a pronunciation course can be identified as being beneficial in which contexts. Until that question can be unequivocally answered, the only certainty is that learners benefit from exposure to ample feedback of a variety of kinds from a variety of sources. However providing adequate feedback is challenging in pronunciation instruction, among other things, because explicit, individualized and teacher-generated feedback, which seems to be a requirement for improvement, is notoriously time-consuming. Can the affordances of an LMOOC facilitate this challenge?

9.2.2 Feedback and Online Affordances Hattie and Timperley (2007) summarize the qualities of effective feedback as follows: Effective feedback must answer three major questions asked by a teacher and/or by a student: Where am I going? (What are the goals?), How am I doing? (What progress is being made toward the goal?), and Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?) (p. 86)

According to this view, an effective pronunciation course, online or F2F, should provide learners with appropriate models of correct pronunciation (where am I going?), opportunities to judge their own pronunciation (how am I doing?), and the necessary information to address any existing problems (where to next?). Since MOOCs and, particularly LMOOCs, are a relatively new phenomenon, many in our profession are still wondering whether massive language courses can provide the necessary affordances to facilitate effective feedback of all three kinds to the same or, perhaps, a larger degree than would be possible in an F2F classroom. The issue of online affordances has received a significant amount of attention recently. In general, the particular qualities of online technologies have been linked directly to the open and participatory nature of Web 2.0. Discussing online learning theory, Anderson (2004) claims that “the greatest affordance of the web for educational use is the profound and multifaceted increase in communication and interaction capability” (p. 42). Of course, the fact that a particular technology provides certain opportunities for learning is no guarantee that the learner will take advantage of them. Ultimately, it is the instructional design of the course, not the technology



Structure of the Courses 

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or the opportunities that it provides that will have an impact on the educational experience. In MOOCs in particular, the massive nature of the course represents two sides of the same coin by creating both a challenge and an affordance. The challenge of assessing and providing feedback to large numbers of learners has been discussed in the recent literature (Clougherty & Popova, 2013) and is typically addressed taking advantage of the other side of the coin: giving peers an increased role in the feedback and assessment process. The LMOOC described in this chapter was designed so that students would have unlimited opportunities to access models of correct pronunciation through digital recordings with examples of native speaker talk that were available to them throughout the course. Since all their pronunciation practice was recorded and archived, they also had the chance to judge their own pronunciation and compare it with the models and thus engage in self-evaluation as often as they wanted. Of course, these are not affordances that are exclusive to an LMOOC or even to an online context. What is crucially distinctive in an online course and, particularly, in a massive one, is the access to feedback. The native speaker models and the chance to self-evaluate repeatedly would be of little use without the proper guidance. In order to bridge the gap between their actual performance and their target, learners need to be given specific, individualized and frequent feedback on their performance. In this course, learners received individualized feedback on all their recordings from an expert (the instructor or one of two assistants) and/or from a peer.

9.3 Structure of the Courses This study compares students in two versions of a Spanish Pronunciation and Phonetics course: a traditional F2F course and an LMOOC both taught by the researcher. The two courses were taught following a very comparable structure. Both included a similar component of explicit phonetic instruction, although the theoretical component was more prominent in the F2F course. Access to recorded models of native speaker pronunciation of target phones and supra-segmental features, lots of opportunities to practice, and frequent feedback were common features of the two course formats. The F2F course was taught as a 15-week course with typical enrollments that ranged between 25 and 35 students. Classes met twice a week for 1 hour and 20 minutes. Class time was normally spent on a discussion of the readings and some practice listening to and analyzing native-speaker as well as learner speech. The F2F course placed more emphasis on the Phonology component of the course at the beginning of the semester and then moved to application and practice during the second half. Also, since the vast majority of students enrolled in the course were native speakers of English, a significant amount of time was devoted to the analysis and practice of features of the Spanish system that are typically challenging for English

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speakers. The course used a Learning Management System (LMS) that allowed students to access recordings of native speaker pronunciation and to record their own speech. The main difference with the LMOOC was the amount and type of feedback in the F2F course. There was plenty of feedback of the first type identified by Hattie and Timperley (2007): what are the goals? This happened during in-class analysis of examples of learner pronunciation and during discussions of the main differences in the phonological systems of English and Spanish. This feedback was provided to the group as a whole. There was a limited amount of individualized corrective feedback. During the course of the semester, students had to do four recordings of their own pronunciation that were uploaded to the LMS. They received a grading with specific feedback on their performance and suggestions for improvement. The LMOOC “Improving your Spanish Pronunciation” was offered for six weeks starting in January 2013. It was one of the courses in the first round of MOOCs offered by Canvas Network, a massive open online course platform developed by Instructure (http://www.instructure.com). All courses included in this first offering were capped at 500 students. There was no cost to participate in the course and it was open to anyone with an elementary knowledge of the language. This course was taught by the author with the help of two assistants, both native speakers of Spanish. This LMOOC was organized as a series of twelve individual modules that covered the basics of Phonetics and Phonology and the specifics of the Spanish phonological system. Each module started with an introduction to the topic using a series of short videos followed by brief quizzes that were automatically graded. Students had to view the videos and complete the quizzes with a minimum score in order to advance to the application component of the module. The practice section of the modules started with audio files of native speakers reading fragments of text that included the phonological features emphasized in each module. Then students were asked to record themselves reading the same sentences or paragraphs and to evaluate themselves using a rubric provided. The free audio editor and recorder Audacity was used to record all the audio files in the course. One of the advantages of this software is that it allows dubbing over existing tracks. This way, students were able to listen to a native speaker’s pronunciation and record their own voice on the same track. When listening to recordings, students were also able to visualize the speech patterns by looking at a spectrogram and compare their own production to the native speaker’s. This practice section of the module was not graded and students could record themselves as often as they wanted. As an element of pronunciation instruction, self-assessment has been identified as a useful tool that can enhance learners’ awareness of their performance, increase their motivation and make the assessment process more learner-centered (Dlaska and Krekeler, 2008). Students then had to listen to peers’ recordings and provide feedback using the same rubric they used to evaluate themselves. Figure 1 shows an example of one of these rubrics. Each student was required to provide feedback to a minimum of two peers. Finally, each module ended with an assignment for students to record a



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paragraph or a series of sentences that included the features practiced in the module. This recording received a grade assigned by the instructors following a rubric shared with the students. The instructors also provided individualized corrective audio feedback to every student who completed an assignment. The feedback identified problems that the student may have had, provided correct models, and included specific suggestions for improvement.

Figure 10.1: Rubric for a graded recording

As is obvious from the description above, students in this LMOOC had access to large quantities of both implicit and explicit feedback. Crucially, the massive and online nature of the course provided the type of feedback that addressed the three goals indicated by Hattie and Timperley (2007) and explained above. Students self-evaluated when they listened to their own pronunciation and recorded it (how am I doing?); they received implicit feedback in the form of a model provided (where am I going?); and, finally, they were given explicit individual corrective feedback (where to go next?) both by their peers in the practice activities and by the instructors in the graded activities. Based on the author’s experience teaching the same Phonetics course in an F2F format, the author wanted to find out if this type of frequent, explicit, individualized feedback that is not readily available in a traditional course could make a difference in a learner’s ability to reach the target performance goals. To that effect, the students’ progress in the LMOOC was measured and compared to that of students enrolled in the traditional F2F pronunciation course. A quasi-experimental study with a pretest and posttest design was carried out to try to answer the following two research questions: –– Do students in an LMOOC experience the same degree of gains in comprehensibility as students enrolled in a face-to-face course of similar content?

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–– What components of the LMOOC result in the strongest gains in students’ comprehensibility? The following sections describe the methods used and report on the results of the study.

9.4 Method 9.4.1 Participants The data for this study come from 50 adult students chosen from a larger population enrolled in two courses described above. The procedure for selecting the students from each group is explained in the next section. Students in both courses completed a background questionnaire at the beginning of the course. They responded to questions about their linguistic background, academic experience in Phonetics, if any, reasons for taking the course, etc. The F2F data come from three sections of the same undergraduate course taught by the researcher and offered at a public university in the United States. The total enrollment for the three sections was 91. The majority of the students enrolled in this course were native speakers of English who were taking the course to satisfy an academic requirement. Most were pursuing a major or minor in Spanish and many of them had had extensive experience abroad. The second course was the LMOOC, “Improving your Spanish Pronunciation”, described above, which enrolled a total of 500 students. Participants in the LMOOC came from a variety of linguistic backgrounds. According to the background questionnaire, around 45% had graduate degrees and a majority, almost 85%, indicated that they were taking the course for personal interest.

9.4.2 Procedures Students in both courses were given a paragraph to read in Spanish (see Appendix A) on the first day of instruction and were asked to record themselves and submit the recordings to the instructor. At the end of the course, both groups were given the same paragraph to read and record themselves again. Students were allowed to record themselves as many times as they wanted until they were satisfied with their performance. They could choose which version of their recording to save and submit. The first recording will be referred henceforth as the pretest and the second recording as the posttest. The data in this study come from a subset of the total enrolment in both courses. First, any student who did not submit either of the two recordings was eliminated.

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Students who indicated in the background questionnaire that they had previous academic experience in Phonetics, even if it was in another language, were not considered for the study. This reduced the number of potential participants to 135 (75 from the face-to-face course and 60 from the LMOOC). Two native speaker judges were asked to rate a random sample of students from both groups. The total number of samples was 100 (60 from the face-to-face course and 40 from the LMOOC). In order to control for possible bias, two judges were chosen who were not highly proficient in a second language. It has been noted that native speakers’ familiarity with a certain foreign accent may affect their judgment of non-native speakers’ ‘accentedness’ (Derwing & Munro, 2005; Rajadurai, 2007). Both judges were experienced teachers of Spanish who were accustomed to dealing with learners. It is important at this point to clarify that the goal of this study was to measure learners’ gains in comprehensibility, which is a construct associated and often confounded with intelligibility and accentedness. Normally, intelligibility is defined by how well a listener is able to understand a speaker’s utterance and it is typically assessed by having the listener transcribe the learner’s speech. Comprehensibility and accentedness are defined as “listeners’ perceptions of how easily they understand an utterance and how closely the pronunciation of an utterance approaches that of a native speaker, respectively” (Kennedy and Trofimovich, 2008). There is a general agreement in our profession that the goal of pronunciation instruction is not to help learners achieve a native-like accent, but rather to help them be understood. Therefore, a rating of accentedness would not be an appropriate measure of the success of this LMOOC. The difference between comprehensibility and intelligibility as Isaacs and Trofimovich (2012) point out, has more to do with whether the notion of intelligibility is understood in its narrow, or broad sense. In its narrow sense, mentioned above, intelligibility is assessed by the accuracy of a written transcription of a learner’s utterances. In its broader sense, though, intelligibility is almost synonymous with comprehensibility in that it refers to the listener’s ability to comprehend someone’s speech. Taking into account the goals of this course and the sample of oral production that is being used as measurement, it seems appropriate to use the construct of comprehensibility. Following Kang, Rubin and Pickering (2010), the author designed a measure of comprehensibility that consisted of five 7-point bipolar Likert scales as illustrated in Figure 10.2. The judges had to assign a numerical rating in each of the categories. The average of these five ratings was used as a final composite rating for further analysis.

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Hard to understand

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Easy to understand

Incomprehensible

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Highly comprehensible

Needed little effort

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Lots of effort to understand

Unclear

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Clear

Simple to grasp the meaning

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Difficult to grasp the meaning

Figure 10.2: Comprehensibility rating scale

In order to practice using the rating scale and to test out its reliability, the judges were given fifteen recordings from students who had been eliminated from the study. To facilitate the calculation of reliability, any time the two judges rated a sample within two tenths or less the rating was considered equivalent. For example, if a sample received a rating of 4.2 by the first judge and 4.4 by the second, the two judges were considered to be in agreement. The level of inter-rater reliability in this test run was 0.78 (Cronbach’s alpha), which is a strong level for a sample of this size. Once they familiarized themselves with the scale, the judges were asked to listen to and rate all 100 pretests and posttests over the course of three days to guarantee consistency in the application of the scale. The total listening time was five hours (average length of recording was 54 seconds). The judges were also encouraged to use the whole range of the scale as much as possible and to take frequent breaks to minimize fatigue. The rating was randomized and blind; that is, the raters were not told which samples corresponded to which group or which recordings were done for the pretest or posttest. Inter-rater reliability for the full round of 100 samples was also strong at 0.86. To control for intra-rater reliability in the full round of ratings and after all the ratings were completed, 15 of the 100 samples were randomly selected and the judges were asked to rate them again. The degree to which their second ratings were consistent with their first was fairly high (0.90 Cronbach’s alpha).

9.5 Results The rating of the pretests revealed that the two groups differed in their level of comprehensibility at the beginning of the course. As expected, the students in the F2F course, the majority of whom were Spanish majors and minors with several years of academic experience in the target language and often experience abroad, received significantly higher scores than the students in the LMOOC (there was no required level of proficiency to register in the LMOOC). The F2F students had an average comprehensibility rating of 5.7, while the LMOOC students’ average rating was 4.4. An independent sample t test showed that the difference in average scores between the

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F2F group (M = 5.7, SD = .62) and the LMOOC group (M = 4.4, SD = .66) was statistically significant (p = .007). In order to guarantee comparability and to be able to accurately assess the effect of the two different formats of instruction, the researcher randomly selected 25 students from each group that would form the basis for further analysis. The validity of the human rating method is widely supported by research and considered to be the benchmark for determining the comprehensibility of speech samples. However, the risk of judge fatigue is a real possibility that puts a limit on the number of samples. This was the justification for setting a relatively low limit for this study. The samples selected had received comprehensibility ratings between 4 and 5 on the pretest and their ratings by the two judges differed by no more than 4 tenths. An independent sample t test confirmed that the two groups of students selected were comparable. The difference in average scores between the 25 students selected from the F2F course (M = 4.52, SD = .35) and the 25 from the LMOOC group (M = 4.48, SD = .36) was not significant (p = .75). There are several reasons that justify focusing the analysis on students in this range of comprehensibility. First, the 4-5 range effectively represents the middle range of comprehensibility in the scale used in this study, since no student in either course received an average rating lower than 2. Secondly, there were very few students in the F2F course whose average rating was lower than 4, so it would not have been possible to compare students at the lower end of proficiency because they were found almost exclusively in the LMOOC. Finally, students in the middle range are more likely to benefit from the effects of instruction than those at higher levels. Prior research has shown that once learners reach a certain level of comprehensibility, their progress towards native-like norms tends to slow (Martinsen, Alvord & Tanner, 2014). Choosing to study the effects of instruction on a relatively uniform group (in terms of their comprehensibility) also responds to the concern that the effectiveness of instruction in Phonetics may differ depending on the level of the students (Arteaga, 2000). Studying learners at similar levels of proficiency at the time of the pretest eliminates a potential confounding factor. Once the two samples of pretests were determined to be equivalent a statistical analysis was performed to measure the students’ gains in comprehensibility between the pretest and the posttest. This analysis would provide an answer to the first research question. A matched-pairs t-test was performed to determine if the difference in comprehensibility ratings after instruction was significant. The results suggest that both groups benefited from the instructional intervention and improved significantly with the greater improvement shown by the students in the LMOOC. Table 10.1 summarizes the results of this analysis.

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Table 10.1: Comprehensibility score means for F2F and LMOOC students

F2F

LMOOC

N

Pretest Mean

Posttest Mean

t

df

p

25

4.52

4.70

1.71

24

.04

(.35)

(.60)

4.48

4.99

1.71

24