DISCOVERING NEW OPPORTUNITIES OF MOOCS IN A LANGUAGE CLASS FRAMEWORK

The study discusses an attempt to repurpose and incorporate freely available online MOOCs into the existing offline academic curriculum. To date a few hybrid learning models have been implemented at HE entities in an attempt to benefit from the available MOOCs. Past research highlighted a few positive implications of suchlike blended learning approach. However, there has been little research on incorporating MOOCs created by third parties into language classes. The authors present several cases of blended learning courses offered to undergraduate and postgraduate students at RUDN University, Moscow. Because of limited hours allocated to face-to-face tuition, it was decided to draw on existing educational resources and incorporate a MOOCs in current ESP curriculum to increase learners' exposure to academic L2 in self-paced independent environment. Upon completion of each module the participants were requested to complete a Likert scale based survey as well as share their de-identified informal feedback on the blended learning experience. As a result of a series of experiments the authors propose several comprehensive models of incorporating MOOCs in L2 classes and discuss limitations and advantages of this approach.