Researching massive open online courses for language teaching and learning

Abstract

There has been an increasing interest in open educational resources, open practices, and open learning spaces in language teaching and learning in the last decade (Comas-Quinn & Borthwick, 2015; Gimeno-Sanz, 2016) in which language massive open online courses (LMOOCs) have played a relevant role. Defined by Bárcena and Martín-Monje (2014: 1) as “dedicated Web-based online courses for second languages with unrestricted access and potentially unlimited participation”, LMOOCs have experienced an exponential growth since their appearance in 2012 (Jitpaisarnwattana, Reinders & Darasawang, 2019), with an unexpected boost due to the recent pandemic, which has led language learning to be in the top 10 subjects of interest in MOOCs (Shah, 2020). MOOCs have caused a stir in the educational landscape, blurring the distinction between formal, non-formal, and informal education, and encouraging new models of content delivery, tuition, assessment, and accreditation. They have been heralded as a serious attempt to democratise higher education, enabling students around the world access to good-quality language learning resources (see, for instance, Mazoue, 2013). MOOCs are both learner centred and socially oriented, and focus on online social interaction and flexible multimodal resources (Bárcena, Read, Martín-Monje & Castrillo, 2014). They eliminate potential problems such as registration fees and compulsory attendance but preserve the essential defining features of an academic course (i.e. syllabus, learning objectives, course materials, activities, teacher–student and student–student interaction, assessment, etc.). There is even the possibility of obtaining a certificate after completing the course, and in some cases participants obtain credits that are valid for further qualifications at university level. Language MOOCs have been acknowledged to be an emergent and expanding research field (Godwin-Jones, 2014; Martín-Monje & Bárcena, 2014; Panagiotidis, 2019), but have been recently identified by Gillespie (2020) as one of the less studied areas in computer-assisted language learning (CALL). Despite this lack of published research, Gillespie notes that “EUROCALL [the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning] has an LMOOC Special Interest Group, so there is clearly interest in this area” (p. 135) and advises researchers to pursue this endeavour. A systematic review of the published literature in LMOOCs (Sallam, Martín-Monje & Li, 2020) has revealed some interesting issues. The main common features of LMOOC design are (1) a robust set of communications for language learning, (2) short videos with linguistic and cultural content, and (3) assessment tools that are valid for heterogeneous cohorts. The main strengths of