Innovation in Language Learning

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) represent a new generation of online education, freely accessible on the internet and reaching very large numbers of students.  Although MOOCs are not entirely new, their scale, scope and pace of the ventures are gaining momentum (Irwanto, Wahyudiati, Saputro & Lukman, 2023). The growth of the MOOCs, with their potential to address the problem of meeting increasing demand for higher education, particularly in developing countries where it is almost impossible to build enough traditional institutions to cope with the number of prospective students, also raises profound questions about the effectiveness of using such online learning technologies at the university level (McClure, 2019). In fact, a thorough literature review has revealed that students’ dispositions have not been sufficiently explored (López Meneses, Vázquez Cano & Mac Fadden, 2020). In this study, 40 pre-service English language teachers at a state university in Turkey, during remote teaching because of the Covid-19 Pandemic, who did not have MOOC experience before, followed a course of their choice for four or five weeks on Coursera voluntarily and completed all the assignments.  The data were gathered through an open-ended questionnaire prepared by the researcher as a result of a thorough literature review. Upon the completion of the course, pre-service language teachers filled out an online questionnaire. The findings mainly indicated positive dispositions with a focus on such terms as “flexible”, “efficient”, “authentic”, “variety”, and “free”. Such positive dispositions were maintained in 15 pre-service language teachers as they stated they followed other MOOCs in different platforms when they were asked a year later. The findings will be discussed with previous studies, and relevant implications will be shared for stakeholders.