The Future of Education

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have shown to be a disruptive innovation in that people who can access the internet can access education anytime, anywhere (Lee, 2017; Simpson, 2017).  This presentation features MandarinX, an organization providing a premier Chinese language learning experience online in partnership with edX, a MOOC provider founded by Harvard and MIT. As of January 2018, MandarinX has experienced high demand with an enrollment of over 220,000 learners across five in-house designed and developed MOOC courses: Basic Mandarin Series: First Steps, Level One, Two, Three and Business Chinese Series: Mandarin Chinese for Business. This presentation introduces the collaboration between MandarinX and the presenter with a focus on its pedagogical design, including print, audio, video, and digital. The presenter will introduce each of the components in detail and how these components facilitate the learning cycle of learners. Additionally, the presenter will address the following questions: (1) how effective is online language learning? (2) the role of social media in MOOCs, (3) the production of MOOCs, including materials development and video production, (4) topic selections and pedagogical manifestation of MOOCs, and (5) the evaluation of learners of MOOCs. Lastly, the presenter aims to combine MandarinX courses and an online speech recognition and immediate feedback tool that provides the learners with immediate and quantitative feedback about accuracy on pronunciations, tones and intonations. This tool also assists learners in identifying and focusing on their actual deficiencies and based on their individual performance, guides them in real time through individualized training, drills and a road to improvement. The presenter argues that while language MOOCs have taken learning opportunities far beyond the traditional limitations of classrooms, the next frontier of innovations in teaching foreign languages lays in providing immediate and tailor-made feedback for individual learners.

Keywords: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), materials design, speech recognition;