MOOCs for Iranian English Learners' Listening Skills

MOOC-massive open online course-is a web-based course available for free to any participant from any place in the world (Cormier, & Siemens, 2010; Kop & Carroll, 2011). It was originally developed in the 1960s. In 2012, Stanford University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts institute of technology and other top universities invested tens of millions of dollars to build the Coursera, Udacity, EdX three online course platforms, launched by the school for free from the Internet, and made the high-quality goods curriculum teacher (Yang Xiufang, Li Haiyan, 2015, pp.

171-172).

According to Rubén Chacón-Beltrán (2013) recently, the development of MOOCs has caught people’s interest both inside and outside the academic world and such courses have been portrayed as a revolution in teaching and learning (para. 2). He also mentioned that previous studies have already shown that the teaching environment found in a MOOC can also provide very suitable conditions for the teaching and learning of aspects that can often be difficult to deal with in traditional learning contexts (p.

245).

For primary challenge to the traditional foreign language teaching class, MOOC promotes the evolution of foreign language teaching resources to differentiation, and will stimulate the global teaching resources as the core of a new round of education competition (Zheng Weiwei, 2017, para.3). As Participation in online learning is increasing in Iran, digital technologies like MOOCs have the potential to dramatically transform Iranian higher education.

Therefore as Zheng Weiwei (2017) said the traditional foreign language teaching reform has had no choice but to lose no time to use the current rapid development of network technology, in view of the different learners learning purpose, layer to provide more extensive and more exciting new forms of foreign language teaching and learning, can win the learners and seek development (para.

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3). Therefore Massive Online Open Courses may well prove to be a good tool and an innovative teaching in Iran to improve education quality for English language learning. In this research the idea of integrating MOOCs in English listening courses will be tested. To examine this notion, a group of learners were asked to participate in a chosen MOOC and express their learning preferences and ideas about its educational value. The results of this study may enhance students’ listening comprehension.

Since MOOCs were first introduced, there has been an ongoing debate about their academic value and significance (Conole, 2013). MOOC can promote the evolution of foreign language teaching resources specially listening since they are mostly in English but there is not enough evidence to confirm that students who participated in MOOCs outperform better in listening skills than students in face to face environment. However, it is suggested by researchers that it can be best done under integration of both. In the words of Griffiths, they “can add further weight to an emerging consensus that online technology can be used to deliver hybrid courses with reduced class time without compromising student outcomes”(Griffithset al.,2014,p. 15). In this paper we thoroughly pay attention to students’ preferences about learning in MOOCs and specify the criteria that make MOOCs a constructive learning environment for learning a new language and a tool for improving listening skills.

Iranian students mostly lack the good conditions for both the input and output of English. Most of them are limited in listening and speaking, because learners have a poor chance of exporting English, and they don’t have much chance to communicate directly with native English speakers. These factors may be the main reasons for the low level of English proficiency in listening. On MOOC platform, students cannot only listen to foreign teachers teaching in their native language, they can also learn with tutors and their peers. Therefore, this study will be significant because first of all the findings will stimulate the awareness on the importance of MOOCs in Iran and their strategies. As it is said, MOOC is the online education alliance that breaks the boundaries, breaks the walls of the campus, and breaks the learning time and space and credits) Qing Song, 2017, p.2028).

The present study also attempts to provide authentic information for teachers and educators to investigate the potentiality of integrating MOOCs on Iranian young learners’ listening courses and to illustrate whether MOOCs can provide an effective and motivating way of enhancing the learners’ listening comprehension. Further, Teachers. Administrators, syllabus designers, managers and material producers will make use of the results of the current study.