English for specific purpose through facilitated and nonfacilitated MOOCs: An analysis of the learners' perspectives

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained attention from learners and teachers across the globe, but high dropout rate is a matter of concern, which makes it imperative to understand the reasons. From the theoretical perspective that learners learn more effectively through collaborative and socially cohesive communities, this qualitative study is focused to understand how learners experience facilitated and nonfacilitated MOOCs. It attempts to explore learners' perspectives from two different groups of learners learning the same MOOC of English for journalism. One of the groups is facilitated for the first week of the course by instructors through face-to-face interactions, whereas the other is not. The perspectives of the learners from both groups regarding their experiences are analyzed through comparative and contrastive thematic analysis of the data collected through participant observation and semistructured interviews of focus groups selected through purposive sampling technique. Though learning the same ESP MOOC, the learners (18-35 in age; all of them university students), register partly similar and largely contrastive learning experiences across the facilitated and nonfacilitated MOOC environments. It is found that the learners, when facilitated, develop a stronger sense of belongingness, accountability, responsibility, peer competition, networking, and solution of issues, which results in retention of the learners. This study foregrounds the effectiveness of hybrid MOOCs, in terms of retention and satisfaction of learners.

Enhancing EFL University Students’ Readiness for Learning Academic Content in English: the Effectiveness of Combining MOOCs with Data-Driven Learning Activities in an English Language Classroom

“…The development of MOOCs in higher education has not only provided broader access to high-quality education but also allowed educators to integrate MOOCs into their teaching in new ways (Israel, 2015). By blending engaging teaching materials readily available from MOOCs with carefully designed in-class, faceto-face instruction, teachers of various subjects have started to experiment with different ways to enhance students' learning processes, such as using MOOCs in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) or English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses (Beaven, 2013;Safdar et al, 2021), creating MOOC-based flipped learning for content courses (Wang & Zhu, 2019), and utilizing MOOCs for CLILbased teaching (Zubkov, 2022).…”

Guest editorial: Distance learning, MOOCs and globalisation of engineering education

“…This could be due to the expertise of the guest editorial team, but it is also true that MOOCs continue to receive a lot of attention in the Computer-Assisted Education research community, as Yousef and Summer [1] point out in this volume. Nevertheless, the use of MOOCs in the specific domain of Engineering Education was somewhat under-researched when the call was launched, which is reflected in this special issue with a number of relevant contributions such as Sahin's [14] analysis of optics software teaching tools, the studies on how learners interact in discussion forums [9,11], learners' behaviour and performance when watching online lecture videos [8], technologyenhanced interventions to increase engineering learners' engagement [2,12], including the best approaches to feedback for those with difficulties [16] and those whose English is not their first language [13].…”