The Summary Journal 6

Nonnative English-Speaking Students' Lived Learning Experience with MOOCs in a Regular College Classroom

Source: International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning Volume 18, Number 5

By Moon-Heum Cho and Moonkyoung Byun

Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea

     Very little is known about how nonnative English-speaking students learn in MOOCs. Several researchers have argued that MOOC developers and educators should consider their needs. Because most MOOCs are offered in English (Shah, 2015a), the language barrier is a concern (Colas, Sloep, & Garetta-Domingo, 2016; Reilly et al., 2016; Sanchez-Gordon & Lujan-Mora, 2014). Nonnative English-speaking students read more slowly than native speakers and likely to play a video slowly to understand instructors' lessons (Reilly et al., 2016) and may require more time to learn the content, sometimes falling behind (Sanchez-Gordon & Lujan-Mora, 2014). Nonnative English-speaking students tend to achieve lower scores than English-speaking students in MOOCs (Engle et al., 2015; Reilly et al., 2016).

     The goal of this study was to examine English-speaking students' lived experiences when MOOCs were adopted as a learning activity in a regular college classroom. The phenomenological method implemented to examine those experiences in 24 Korean college students. Phenomenology is an approach used to uncover the meaning of human experience as people live in (van Manen, 2007). Bruyn (1966) held that "phenomenology serves as the rationale behind efforts to understand individuals by entering into their field of perception in order to see life as these individuals see it". The phenomenon under study in this paper is nonnative English-speaking students' experience taking a MOOC as a learning activity in a regular college classroom because the researchers aimed both at exploring and interpreting their experiences with a MOOC and because phenomenology supports descriptive and interpretative analysis.

     The researchers collected students' learning experiences from multiple data sources to validate and triangulate the findings. These multiple data sources included one-on-one interviews, an open-ended online survey, observation notes on the MOOCs, weekly online journal entries, and social interaction via KakaoTalk.

      Six themes emerged from data analysis as the finding of this study: wonder and interest, novel learning and teaching practices in a MOOC, preference for video style, learning strategies, motivation to learn in a MOOC, and need for face-to-face interaction. Implications for integrating a MOOC into a regular college course are also presented.