A week around/inside EMOOCs (by Ana Mora)

From my perspective as an empirical scientist, I could never imagine the scope of online learning platforms. Although I have participated as a learner in some language and transversal skills courses, I had never stopped to think about its importance in an increasingly technological world. The idea to offer quality knowledge with the advantages of online learning could seem simple, but I have learnt this week how many problems must be face up: starting from social differences to avoid misunderstandings at language MOOCs, until making easier the access to the courses without internet connection.  These are only two examples of many others that have been discussed by experts during this intense week.

One of the sessions that I have enjoyed the most (maybe because it has been the most revealing for me) was about MOOCs aimed at immigrants and refugees. When we think about what these people need, I am sure that basic necessities come firstly to our mind. Nowadays, in a world that runs fast, integration, multiculturalism, and solidarity are daily words. The massive amount of people that run away from their houses looking for a better life and wellbeing, are needy of language and cultural training to achieve a quick adaptation and return to normality as soon as possible. In this session, the speakers talked about the possibilities and the advances that have been developed during the last years in order to help refugee to feel comfortable at the place they arrive. I can imagine how much easier would be to know the foreign language only to explain how you feel, and MOOCs seem to be a suitable possibility for this purpose. In my opinion, this could be a good way through which western world can support them and fight for integration. However, as one of the speaker said, it has to be real and reach everybody in this situation, which means that it has to be facilitated to people without internet or computer. The way? It has to be find, but where there is a will there is a way.

In addition, the UC3M volunteers had the opportunity to attend to one of the workshops of the congress. In my case, I enjoyed the two sessions of the workshop “Learning Analytics to Overcome Language Barriers”. During this time, we firstly discussed about the challenges that face a student of a language course in a MOOC. After an intense brainstorm, we concluded that the most common problems are cultural misunderstandings in forums or due to typical expressions and idioms of the language, the necessity of a glossary for technical terms, and also the difficulty to learn a language in a another language. Although some of these problems could be solve through the data that the MOOC can provide, in the majority of the cases these massive data are difficult to manage. For this reason, the workshop conclude with another idea storm about what we think could be the best question to the data the MOOC offers. From my little experience in the MOOC-world, I realized at this moment that research about data we can obtain from the platforms and how to manage them is essential.

I would like to end this post by thanking the organizing committee for giving me the opportunity of being part of the organization of the conference. For me, the EMOOCs 2017 Summit has been a very enriching experience, not only professionally but personally.