Abstract
<p>A new approach for overcoming the language and culture barriers to participation in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is reported. It is hypothesised that the juxtaposition of English as the <em>language of instruction</em>, used for interacting with course materials, and one’s preferred language as the <em>language of participation</em>, used for interaction with peers and facilitators, is preferable to “English only” for participation in a MOOC. The Hands-On ICT (HANDSON) MOOC included seven teams of facilitators, each catering for a different language community. Facilitators were responsible for promoting active participation and peer tutoring. Comparing language groups revealed a series of predictors of intention to learn, some of which became apparent in the first days of the MOOC already. The comparison also uncovered four critical factors that influence participation: facilitation, language of participation, group size, and a pre-existing sense of community. Especially crucial was reaching a sufficient number of active participants during the first week. We conclude that multilingual facilitation activates participation in MOOCs in various ways, and that synergy between the four aforementioned factors is critical for the formation of the learning network that supports a social dynamic of active participation. Our approach suggests future targets for the development of the multilingual and community potential of MOOCs.</p>
Highlights
MOOCs and Multilingual EducationMassive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become popular instruments for opening up education to non-traditional student audiences, including those from different cultures and language groups (Deimann & Vogt, 2015; Fitzgerald, Wu, & Witten, 2014)
The facilitation approach sketched in the above we investigated in the Hands-On ICT (HANDSON) MOOC a course offered to educators at all educational levels aimed at letting them become more conversant with the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in their teaching
The HANDSON MOOC experiment sought to investigate the veracity of two hypotheses: i) whether using English only as the language of instruction negatively affects the completion rate (Hypothesis 1) and ii) whether using each participant’s native language for facilitation would boost participation (Hypothesis 2)
Summary
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become popular instruments for opening up education to non-traditional student audiences, including those from different cultures and language groups (Deimann & Vogt, 2015; Fitzgerald, Wu, & Witten, 2014). Research shows that a mere 20% of the world's population is able to profit from English only educational content (Beaven, Comas-Quinn, Hauck, de los Arcos, & Lewis, 2013). There, MOOCs in different languages would promote cross-cultural and multilingual learning, helping to preserve Europe’s rich cultural, educational and linguistic heritage (Brouns, Serrano MartínezSantos, Civera, Kalz, & Juan, 2015; Lundahl, 2014; Sloep & Schuwer, 2015).
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