Abstract
This case study investigated the self-regulated learning strategies that university students employ while engaging with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as part of an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course. Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) involves the processes whereby students plan, monitor, evaluate, and adjust their performance towards goal attainment. Literature from MOOCs identifies self-regulation as an essential feature of participants who successfully take part in such courses. Learners are anticipated to monitor their learning while working with the online material at their own pace and connecting with other learners around the world whenever they want. Using MOOCs as supplementary learning material for a face-to-face academic English course provides an interesting picture of the learning strategies that students use while embracing openness within a formal learning context. This paper reports on the data collected from two online questionnaires administered to identify and compare the SRL strategies that participants used before and after their MOOC engagement. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted to complement the quantitative data. Data analysis shows that strategic planning and metacognitive monitoring strategies tend to be used more than help-seeking strategies during MOOC engagement. Findings also highlight students’ positive attitudes towards the study as well as their suggestions for future blended MOOC practices within academic English courses.
Highlights
In a previous case study conducted by Beaven (2013), English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students worked with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) related to their fields of education as a way to compensate for the lack of well-designed subject-specific published materials in English
MOOCs, which have their roots in open educational resources and connectivist pedagogy, tend to be openly available to people around the world regardless of prior qualifications or professional experience
This case study of Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) focussed on the level of strategic processes employed by university students who used MOOCs as supplements to an EAP course
Summary
Language learning materials for specialised domains tend not to be widely available (Colpaert, 2016). This becomes an obstacle when attempting to present relevant materials to students who come from different areas of study to the EAP classroom. In a previous case study conducted by Beaven (2013), EAP students worked with MOOCs related to their fields of education as a way to compensate for the lack of well-designed subject-specific published materials in English. MOOCs, which represent the development of online learning at a massive scale (Daniel, 2012), are designed around the presentation of subject-specific resources (Sokolik, 2016). This case study examined the use of MOOCs to supplement classroom activity, and to identify students’ selfregulatory strategies in an EAP course offered at the University of Ferrara in Italy. Most of the participants had a B2 level of proficiency in English, which was adequate for engaging with the academic content of the MOOCs, since at this level students can understand the main ideas of complex texts in their academic fields (Council of Europe, 2018)
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