Personnally, I believe that MOOCs - like distant courses provided via a Moodle plateform - could be useful tools for foreign language teaching and learning. But I don't believe that they could replace "in praesentia courses" courses in language labs. I am teaching communication and media studies in the French National Institute of Oriental Languages (INALCO). One of the principal offers of this Institute is composed of curricula in some 80 languages. I think that MOOCs as well as distant courses provided via Moodle (for instance) are interesting options for people eager to become more familiar with languages and cultures that are not offered in every university (such as English, French, German, Spanish, etc.).

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your insights. My experience so far was that we desinged a beginners' English MOOC and it was quite successful, both in terms of the number of participants and their language development. I think you are porbably right when you suggest that not all language contents and skills can be covered in a MOOC but I also think that there's a lot of work to be done. It would probably be very interesting to see what language contents and at what levels students can benefit more from MOOC-type teaching and learnng.

Hi Rubén,

I completely agree with you and your remark that there has to be done again a lot of (experimental) work in order to understand what are the "real" limits of MOOCs or MOOC-type teaching and learning for foreign language (and culture) study. In any case, I belive that there is big potential in this kind of platforms which we have maybe to appropriate again as teachers, learners and also "course designers. With all my best regards Peter

Thanks Judith,

That sounds interesting and definitely I'll have a look.

The MOOC we run finished its first edition in June (it's open now but there are periods when factilitators take care of participants) and I'm still processing the data that was gathered through an online questionnarie. It's taking time because around 14.500 people completed our MOOC and around 850 people answered the questionnarie. Later in october I'll be presenting part of the data analysis at:

4th World Conference on Learning, Teaching and Educational Leadership, 27-29 October 2013, University of Barcelona, Barcelona – Spain

The proceedings will be published right away so, if you are interested, I can post the reference right after the conference.

Best,

Rubén

Hi,

I have seen many MOOCs in different languages and they are doing OK with the number of participants. As an example there is two moocs platform provided in Arabic and they are doing OK!

I have also heard of a European project that will translate number of moocs to the national languages of Europe like German, dutch...etc.

Hope this answer helps!