This paper reports on how the FutureLearn MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) Becoming a Better Teacher was blended into English Language Teaching (ELT) university programmes in conjunction with telecollaboration. It discusses how the addition of a MOOC blend can enhance a telecollaborative exchange by adding to it increased opportunities for social collaborative interaction on a global scale. BMELTET fosters the students’ reflection on online and blended learning and teaching to support their future teaching practice. The paper illustrates how participating students – undergraduate ELT students from Spain and postgraduate ELT students studying in the UK - participated in both synchronous and asynchronous exchanges on the MOOC content. The discussion will focus on how a holistic approach to the integration of technology into language teacher education programmes with a blend of formal and informal platforms can support students in reflecting on their beliefs. <br/

Byram

Müller-Hartmann

Orsini-Jones

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BMELTET – Blending MOOCs into English language teacher education with telecollaboration

Orsini-Jones, Marina

Cervero' Carrascosa, Abraham

Coventry University Pure Portal

47© 2019 Marina Orsini-Jones and Abraham Cerveró Carrascosa (CC BY)7BMELTET – Blending MOOCs into English language teacher education with telecollaborationMarina Orsini-Jones1 and Abraham Cerveró Carrascosa2AbstractThis paper reports on how the FutureLearn Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Becoming a Better Teacher was blended into English Language Teaching (ELT) university programmes in conjunction with telecollaboration. It discusses how the addition of a MOOC blend can enhance a telecollaborative exchange by adding to it increased opportunities for social collaborative interaction on a global scale. Blending MOOCs into English Teacher Education with Telecollaboration (BMELTET) fosters the students’ reflection on online and blended learning and teaching to support their future teaching practice. The paper illustrates how participating students – undergraduate ELT students from Spain and postgraduate ELT students studying in the UK – participated in both synchronous and asynchronous exchanges on the MOOC content. The discussion will focus on how a holistic approach to the integration of technology into language teacher education programmes with a blend of formal and informal platforms can support students in reflecting on their beliefs.Keywords: MOOCs, ELT, blended, telecollaboration.1. Coventry University, Coventry, England; m.orsini@coventry.ac.uk; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5250-56822. Florida Universitària, Valencia, Spain; acervero@florida-uni.esHow to cite this chapter: Orsini-Jones, M., & Cerveró Carrascosa, A. (2019). BMELTET – Blending MOOCs into English language teacher education with telecollaboration. In A. Plutino, K. Borthwick & E. Corradini (Eds), New educational landscapes: innovative perspectives in language learning and technology (pp. 47-53). Research-publishing.net. https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2019.36.955Chapter 7 481. IntroductionTelecollaboration can foster the development of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) for the digital age (Helm & Guth, 2010, p. 74; Müller-Hartmann & O’Dowd, 2017, p. 2; Lloyd, Cerveró-Carrascosa, & Green, 2018; Orsini-Jones & Lee, 2018). It enables participants to develop both the intercultural ‘savoirs’ proposed by Byram, Gribkova, and Starkey (2002), and also their media literacy.Previous related studies illustrated that embedding an existing MOOC that is relevant to the syllabus covered by students engaged in teacher education, and combining it with telecollaboration, appears to enhance participants’ critical digital literacy and ICC (Orsini-Jones, Conde Gafaro, & Altamimi, 2017). Such projects can moreover help with dispelling existing negative beliefs about e-learning held by students engaged in ELT teacher education (Orsini-Jones et al., 2018).BMELTET involved undergraduate ELT students from Florida Universitària (FU) in Spain and postgraduate ELT students studying at Coventry University (CU) in the UK. The integration of the FutureLearn MOOC Becoming a Better Teacher: Enhancing Professional Development (designed by the British Council and University College London, Institute of Education) into the existing curriculum in the two institutions offered the opportunity for students to reflect on their professional development with a worldwide community of practice. The main research question posed was whether or not BMELTET could support students in ELT education in adopting a holistic approach to the integration of technology in their future practice while developing their ICC.2. Method2.1. ParticipantsThis study discusses the occurrence of the BMELTET project that was carried out between September and December 2017. The Spanish participants were 12 third Marina Orsini-Jones and Abraham Cerveró Carrascosa 49year undergraduate students on a four-year degree course (Bachelor of Arts in primary education). They were all Spanish nationals, between 18-30 years of age. Fifty-six percent had prior teaching experience.The students based in the UK were 26, from a variety of different nationalities: 15 Chinese, six British, and one respectively from Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea, the Netherlands, and Pakistan; they were between 21-60 years of age. Fifty-four percent had prior teaching experience.2.2. ProcedureAll participants read and signed a consent form that had been approved by the ethics governance unit at CU and agreed to:• fill in a pre-project and post-project online survey;• engage with the Becoming a Better Teacher MOOC for three hours per week for the four weeks of its duration, while also doing their related ELT course face-to-face and engaging in telecollaboration with their partners;• record their reflections on how their learning experience was affected by the MOOC platform and its global social collaborative features while engaging with it in three ways: in the MOOC discussion, face-to-face in class, and on the dedicated Moodle telecollaborative discussion; and• participate in two class-to-class live Skype reflective sessions.2.3. TasksA dedicated Moodle BMELTET website was created to enable participants to discuss specific units in the MOOC. A Skype all-class session was carried out for two of the tasks related to the MOOC topics and the relevant curricular content linked to the MOOC in each institutional programme. Students posted their Chapter 7 50reflections both in the discussions in Moodle and in the MOOC. Live Moodle Chat was also used, but proved to be less effective than asynchronous forum postings and Skype exchanges.The first week focused, for example, on the conceptualisation of Continuous Professional Development (CPD) on the MOOC. Students were invited to take part in the MOOC discussion and reflect on this experience individually in the relevant Moodle forum. Subsequently, they were paired up (one from FU and one from CU) to post together on the topics covered on the MOOC in the Moodle forums. Another task involved working on ‘valid and desirable principles’ to apply to language learning and teaching (see Figure 1, a screen shot from the Moodle discussion that supported the project).Figure 1. Screen shot of telecollaborative pair reflection3. Results and discussionIn the pre-BMELTET survey, there was a marked difference between the participants from FU and CU regarding their initial awareness of what a MOOC is: only 46% of the participants from CU against 89% from FU. The fact that most CU participants were from overseas would appear to be a factor here.Marina Orsini-Jones and Abraham Cerveró Carrascosa 51Another difference in the pre-BMELTET survey had to do with the perception of usefulness of online learning. The statement set was: ‘online learning is not suitable for language learning’. While 66.9% of FU participants chose either ‘mostly disagree’ or ‘strongly disagree’, with only 33.3% ‘neither agree nor disagree’, the breakdown for CU was a 57.7% of positive feedback and 42.3% negative.None of the participants had taken part in telecollaboration before BMELTET.The post-BMELTET survey highlighted a shift in position amongst CU participants, who appeared to align with FU participants in having found the experience of engaging online with a MOOC and with telecollaboration.The major findings from the survey were:• 70% of participants agreed that engaging with the BMELTET project changed their beliefs as a teacher;• 80% agreed that the MOOC discussions made them feel part of a worldwide community of practice;• 60% agreed that taking part in the project had changed their beliefs on online learning (in a positive way); and• 80% agreed that the project had helped them with reflecting on their teaching practice in a novel way.A small group of students (10%) did however write in the open comments that they still preferred a face-to-face mode of instruction to a blended or distance one, e.g. “Actually, even if we need to use technology, I’d prefer to be taught in traditional ways” (Student A).A limitation of these findings is that the participation in the post-BMELTET survey was considerably lower (31% of all participants) than in the pre-Chapter 7 52BMELTET one (85% of all participants). All students however commented positively on the telecollaborative Skype exchanges during oral feedback sessions, which had enabled them to discuss specific intercultural issues relating to their teaching contexts.The encouraging results reported above are summarised well in this comment extracted from the post-BMELTET survey: “[It] is a good and interesting experience. I would put it into practice for the future because I am learning a lot” (Student B).4. ConclusionsAll participants commented positively on how the project had made them aware of the potential of online and blended learning for ELT and made them realise that online collaboration, both via MOOCs and telecollaboration, was useful for the purpose of enhancing their CPD, their reflective practice and their ICC. Not all students were however at ease with the project and some found it challenging because of its digital complexities (number of digital platforms used and passwords to handle). Nevertheless, the data collected and discussed here demonstrate evidence of a shift in positive beliefs towards online and blended learning for most participants and an appreciation of the ‘added value’ of blended learning, which, it is hoped, will support a holistic approach to the adoption of technology in their future practice3.AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank all the students who participated in this project between September and December 2017.3. The authors are aware of the fact that the General Data Protection Regulation introduced in May 2018 might limit the opportunity to mix formal and informal learning discussed here.Marina Orsini-Jones and Abraham Cerveró Carrascosa 53ReferencesByram, M., Gribkova, B., & Starkey, H. (2002). Developing the intercultural dimension in language teaching: a practical introduction for teachers. Council of Europe.Helm, F., & Guth S. (2010). The multifarious goals of telecollaboration 2.0: theoretical and practical implications. In S. Guth & F. Helm (Eds), Telecollaboration 2.0 (pp 69-106). Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0351-0013-6Lloyd, E., Cerveró-Carrascosa, A., & Green, C. (2018). A role-reversal model of telecollaborative practice: the student-driven and student-managed FloCo. In M. Orsini-Jones & S. Smith (Eds), Flipping the blend through MOOCs, MALL and OIL – new directions in CALL (pp. 51-58). Research-publishing.net. https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2018.23.790Müller-Hartmann, A., O’Dowd, R. (2017). A training manual on telecollaboration for teacher trainers. https://www.evaluateproject.eu/evlt-data/uploads/2017/09/Training-Manual_EVALUATE.pdfOrsini-Jones, M., Conde, B., Borthwick, K., Zou, B., & Ma, W. (2018). BMELTT: blending MOOCs for English language teacher training. Teaching English, ELT Research Papers 18.02, British Council. https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/Pub_J121_Blending%20MOOCs%20for%20English%20language%20teacher%20training_FINAL_Web.pdfOrsini-Jones, M., Conde Gafaro, B., & Altamimi, S. (2017). Integrating a MOOC into the Postgraduate ELT curriculum: reflecting on students’ beliefs with a MOOC blend. In Q. Kan & S. Bax (Eds), Beyond the language classroom: researching MOOCS and other innovations  (pp.1-13). Research-publishing.net. https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2017.mooc2016.672Orsini-Jones, M., & Lee, F. (2018). Intercultural communicative competence for global citizenship: identifying rules of engagement in telecollaboration. Palgrave MacMillanPublished by Research-publishing.net, a not-for-profit associationVoillans, France, info@research-publishing.net© 2019 by Editors (collective work)© 2019 by Authors (individual work)New educational landscapes: innovative perspectives in language learning and technologyEdited by Alessia Plutino, Kate Borthwick, and Erika CorradiniPublication date: 2019/07/10Rights: the whole volume is published under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives International (CC BY-NC-ND) licence; individual articles may have a different licence. Under the CC BY-NC-ND licence, the volume is freely available online (https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2019.36.9782490057481) for anybody to read, download, copy, and redistribute provided that the author(s), editorial team, and publisher are properly cited. Commercial use and derivative works are, however, not permitted.Disclaimer: Research-publishing.net does not take any responsibility for the content of the pages written by the authors of this book. The authors have recognised that the work described was not published before, or that it was not under consideration for publication elsewhere. While the information in this book is believed to be true and accurate on the date of its going to press, neither the editorial team nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions. The publisher makes no warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein. While Research-publishing.net is committed to publishing works of integrity, the words are the authors’ alone.Trademark notice: product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.Copyrighted material: every effort has been made by the editorial team to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyrighted material in this book. In the event of errors or omissions, please notify the publisher of any corrections that will need to be incorporated in future editions of this book.Typeset by Research-publishing.netCover design by © Raphaël Savina (raphael@savina.net)ISBN13: 978-2-490057-48-1 (Ebook, PDF, colour)ISBN13: 978-2-490057-49-8 (Ebook, EPUB, colour)ISBN13: 978-2-490057-47-4 (Paperback - Print on demand, black and white)Print on demand technology is a high-quality, innovative and ecological printing method; with which the book is never ‘out of stock’ or ‘out of print’.British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.A cataloguing record for this book is available from the British Library.Legal deposit, UK: British Library.Legal deposit, France: Bibliothèque Nationale de France - Dépôt légal: juillet 2019.

BMELTET: Blending MOOCs into English Language Teacher Education with Telecollaboration

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BMELTET: Blending MOOCs into English Language Teacher Education with Telecollaboration

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