Abstract—Massive Open Online Courses have been widely
used all over the world in recent years in entirely online
learning context or as blended learning on campus. Most of
these courses are offered in English. A high percentage of the
users, however, are speaking English as a second language.
Some of the authors of this paper who either used MOOCs for
blended learning or a research subject are English as a second
language speakers as well. They have observed whilst teaching
students at university during blended teaching using MOOCs
that the students struggle in courses offered in English. This has
motivated us to explore this issue in MOOCs to contribute to the
pedagogy of MOOCs. The main question that we consider is
how can these platforms give a better experience to second
language English speakers. There are many sub-problems of
this big research question. In this paper we would like to briefly
present our initial findings and give an overview of the research
on this area.
Index Terms—Second language English speakers, MOOC,
course engagement, FutureLearn, personalization.
Gülüstan Doğan and İsmail Duru are with Yildiz Technical University,
İstanbul, Turkey (e-mail: gulustan@yildiz.edu.tr, iduru@yildiz.edu.tr).
Ayşe Saliha Sunar and Su White are with University of Southampton, UK
(e-mail: ass1a12@soton.ac.uk, saw@ecs.soton.ac.uk).
Cite: Gülüstan Doğan, Ayşe Saliha Sunar, İsmail Duru, and Su White, "Who Is the English as a Second Language Speaker in this MOOC?," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 213-217, 2018.