The present study reports on an attempt to apply the principles of autonomous learning within the curriculum of an online course for teaching English to Iranian adult language learners. The contents of the course (i.e. general English) were delivered using work-cycles (Legenhausen, 2003) and were completed in the form of students’ projects. Each work-cycle started by setting personal learning goals in the planning and negotiation phase, deciding on the project in the decision-making phase, completing the actual project in the project phase, followed by an evaluation of the outcomes in the evaluation phase. Different phases of the cycle fitted autonomous learning framework, enabling the implementation of the principles of learner autonomy. Finally, after the actual implementation of the principles of learner autonomy through work-cycles, learners’ perceptions were assessed to estimate the efficiency of autonomous learning using work-cycles which revealed an overall positive pattern of beliefs. However, despite general success of work-cycles in implementing autonomous learning, a gap between learners’ autonomous beliefs and behaviors was observed which necessitates further preparation in the form of awareness-raising.

The present study reports on a collaborative writing project initiated and completed by 18 Iranian English language learners enrolled in an online writing course. Using a wiki as the core element of the project, the aim of the course was fostering learner autonomy in online settings based on the collaborative autonomous language learning framework proposed by Kessler and Bikowski (2010). The outcome of collaborative writing project was a text created in a wiki, which was manually analyzed from the very beginning of writing to the final revisions and reflections to find autonomous alterations made by student writers. The findings of the study revealed student-writers' autonomous contributions in the form of alterations to the text which were accomplished interdependently with peers through alterations such as commenting as an instance of scaffolding to reach a shared goal. Other types of autonomous alterations such as adding new information; deleting existing information; correction of information; clarification; synthesis; and reflection were observed in the final product. Frequent occurrence of peer correction with regard to content and form was a discriminating finding of the current study. Also, despite the initial goal which was completion of the project exclusively by learners, teacher intervention was witnessed throughout the process. To study the role of teacher in depth, a semi-structured interview about the roles of a teacher in a collaborative autonomous learning was conducted. The data from the interview went through a manual thematic analysis to find the themes related to the learners' perceptions of teacher's roles. The findings revealed a need for a teacher as a facilitator and resource, which highlighted students' demands for motivation and content knowledge from teacher in an autonomous contribution to completing a collaborative project.

The concept of language learner autonomy has influenced ComputerAssisted Language Learning (CALL) to the extent that Schwienhorst (2012) informs us of a paradigm change in CALL design in the light of learner autonomy. CALL is not considered a tool anymore, but a learner environment available to language learners anywhere in the world. Based on a work-cycle as a practical framework for implementing autonomy in online courses (Legenhausen, 2003), the current study introduces WebQuest to be used as ideas and an activity bank. Work cycle design takes several principles of learner autonomy such as goal setting, content and format choice, self-evaluation and reflection in action and is defined as a learner-based approach that emphasises metacognitive knowledge that raises students' awareness to become more conscious of their own language learning process, strengths and weaknesses (Ter Haseborg, 2012). The idea and activity bank at the top of a work cycle provides learners with the opportunity to plan and negotiate, make decisions, do project work and evaluate their learning in a cyclic mode. Thus, the current article argues that because of its flexibility and accessibility, WebQuests lend themselves to the work cycle approach in online courses aimed at fostering autonomy. Moreover, the findings of the current study indicate that WebQuests contribute to the development of learner autonomy by encouraging critical thinking among learners.