B-MELTT: Blending MOOCs for English Language Teacher Training

Marina Orsini-Jones, Barbara Conde Gafaro, Malin WU, Kate Borthwick, B. Zou

    Research output: Book/ReportCommissioned reportpeer-review

    1 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    Teachers’ beliefs exert a strong influence on their practice. Therefore it is essential that students undertaking teacher education develop an ability to critically assess their own beliefs in relation to practice. The BMELTT (Blending MOOCs for English Language Teacher Training) project explores how the integration of an existing MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) into ELT programmes at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, can impact on students’ beliefs, while at the same time providing them with the opportunity to engage in reflection with a global community of practice. The participants were students on ELT programmes in the UK, the Netherlands and China, some were experienced teachers and some were new to teacher education. BMELTT involved reflecting on ELT themes in three ways: face-to-face in class; through a Virtual Exchange (VE) with the project partners; and with all the participants on the MOOC (around 40,000). To the authors’ knowledge, there are no other research studies of this nature available, where a MOOC blend is used in conjunction with a VE to support the reflection on professional development in ELT. Another distinctive feature of BMELTT is that the action research cycle reported here was driven by an ‘expert student’, which enabled staff to see their practice from a novel perspective.

    The results illustrate that BMELTT stimulated a reflection on what it means to be an autonomous learner and an autonomous teacher in the digital age. It is hoped that these results can provide the ELT community with an innovative model of professional development.
    Original languageEnglish
    Place of PublicationLondon
    PublisherBritish Council
    Commissioning bodyBritish Council
    Number of pages48
    VolumeJ121
    Edition18-02
    ISBN (Print)978-0-86355-922-8
    Publication statusPublished - Jan 2019

    Publication series

    NameEnglish Language Teaching Research Award (ELTRA) - Teaching English Research Paper
    PublisherBritish Council ISBN 978-0-86355-922-8
    No.2018-02
    VolumeJ121

    Keywords

    • MOOC, ELT, Reflective Practice, Action-Research, China, BMELTT (Blending MOOCs for English Language Teacher Education), Beliefs, Autonomy, Flipped MOOC blend
    • Teacher training
    • autonomy, English Language Teaching, expert students, alien, troublesome, beliefs, MOOC, blended learning, metacognition

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • General Arts and Humanities

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'B-MELTT: Blending MOOCs for English Language Teacher Training'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this