LangMOOCs – Promoting multilingualism through Massive Open Online Courses

The kick-off meeting for the project LangMOOCs – Language Massive Open Online Courses was held in Athens, Greece, on February 19^th and 20^th 2015.

LangMOOCs is a project funded by the Erasmus + Programme, Key Action 2 – Strategic Partnerships in the field of adult education, and it aims at promoting the use of Massive Open Online Courses in non-academic institutions, while researching their potential in language learning.

In an increasingly interconnected world, language skills are becoming a critical asset to boost people’s participation in education and training and, above all, to ease youth’s access to the labour market. In this context, the demand for language courses is rising, while ICTs and innovative web-based tools are widening the opportunities for knowledge acquisition and exchange of experiences worldwide. Traditional teaching methods and learning environments are undergoing deep change, as well as the whole teacher-learner relationship and pedagogical patterns. In such a framework, e-learning opportunities are growing at a fast pace, and distance learning is evolving in new forms of training. A perfect example of this is represented by the recent phenomenon of MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses, i.e. online courses with a high number of participants which are based on a participative approach, on the democratization of knowledge and on lifelong learning.

The idea behind the LangMOOCs project is to research the potential of MOOCs in language learning, while exploring the pedagogical framework of Language MOOCs. The project will lead to the production of a toolkit for the creation and management of Language MOOCs and the design of language Open Educational Resources (OERs) in Greek, Italian, German, English and Norwegian, to be tested in a pilot course.

The first meeting of the project offered a chance for all partners to meet up and start planning the next steps to take: the first phase of the project will be focused on a research, aiming to review existing MOOC experiences and to analyse and benchmark MOOC pedagogical approaches. Next, the project partners will carry out a study on available MOOCs for language learning.

The research will be a basis for the design of a toolkit on how to create and manage a language MOOC, as well as for the delivery of pilot language MOOCs, contributing, in the long term, to encourage the study of less-spoken European languages.

Project partners

• Active Citizens Partnership – Coordinator (Greece)
• CESIE (Italy)
• Iberika education group gGmbH (Germany)
• Dacorum Council for Voluntary Service (United Kingdom)
• Høgskolen i Sør-Trøndelag (Norway)

For further information about the project, follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or write to the following e-mail address: francesca.vacanti@cesie.org

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