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The purpose of this research was to investigate which elements contribute to a successful online language learning from students’ perspective. The context of the research was the pilot language courses which were created in the frame of KiVAKO-project [1]. The KiVAKO project is funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture [2] and its aim is to develop and build nationwide online language course offering on a shared Moodle platform. The programme started in autumn 2018 with 86 language teachers of 8 universities and 18 universities of applied sciences. The course offering covers the following languages: Chinese, Estonian, Finnish Sign Language, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. In addition, an eTandem course was created for peer language studying. After piloting 8 courses in the autumn term 2019, the students answered an online questionnaire. The data in this research consist of the replies of the questionnaire, and they were analysed according to the qualitative content analysis method [3]. The findings suggest that the course design, study material, teachers’ actions and assignments affect the most to the students’ positive perception of the online language course, whereas technology, study material, course design and assignments are the aspects that hinder the learning experience the most. This study provides recommendations for educators in terms of aspects to contemplate in designing an online language course.

Keywords: online learning, language learning, higher education.

1. http://www.kivako.fi/">http://www.kivako.fi/
2. https://minedu.fi/en/frontpage">https://minedu.fi/en/frontpage
3. Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.