Innovation in Language Learning

The growing demand for higher education has led institutions and organizations to develop educational platforms that allow them to prepare, implement and integrate flexible learning environments for those students who are not able to attend in-person lessons. The University of Veracruz has responded to this request with EMINUS, the institutional platform, which has been specially designed to reach this goal.

At all the Language Centers of the University, a group of professors has been trained in the design of materials and e-tutoring, in order to create and implement English online courses on EMINUS.

This paper presents the way that English online courses started at the University of Veracruz using the EMINUS platform. It also describes some challenges and changes both, the platform and the online courses have faced through the years, as well as some strengths and weaknesses detected according to the authors’ point of view and the effectiveness on students’ language acquisition.

Finally, we present a proposal to help teachers and students improve their online teaching-learning skills.