This chapter reports on the project ‘Blending MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) into English Language Teaching (ELT) Education with Telecollaboration (BMELTET)'. BMELTET aims to foster reflection on ELT with a COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) MOOC blend. It promotes the engagement of international students based in the UK and studying on a Master's degree in ELT, with students and staff based in universities in Brazil, China, and Spain and with the participants on the MOOC from all over the world. BMELTET aims to debunk the myth of the ‘native speaker' as the ideal teacher of English language, thus decolonising ELT through dialogic online intercultural exchanges in a safe ‘third space'. Data were collected via two online surveys, the analysis of the ‘live' Zoom exchanges, and focus groups with self-selected groups of students. This chapter reports on the impact that BMELTET had on the international students involved in it.
This study reports on the 2019-2020 October-February cycle of the
project, Blending Massive Open Online Courses in English Teacher Education
with Telecollaboration (BMELTET). The project blends the MOOC Understanding
Language (Futurelearn) with telecollaboration – or Collaborative Online
International Learning (COIL) or Virtual Exchange (VE). It involves students
enrolled on teacher education courses at both undergraduate level (from
Spain) and postgraduate level (from the UK and China). This work discusses
some of the challenges encountered in this 2019-2020 pre-COVID cycle and
proposes, in line with other previous related studies, that
telecollaboration is troublesome for students as it takes them out of their
comfort zone. It does not align with what they were expecting to study at
university. At the same time, BMELTET illustrates the gains that students
and staff can make when engaging in such a project and its transformational
impact on their beliefs.
The aim of this paper is to report on the impact of the BMELTET project ‘Blending MOOCs into English Language Teaching Education with Telecollaboration' in EFL pre-service teacher education in Florida Universitària in València (Spain) with their counterparts from the UK and China. The present study will offer the views of FU students' perceptions on the development of their TEFL specific competences. Data were collected through surveys, a focus group, and personal interviews on how their experience in BMELTET influenced their in-class professional practice. Results suggest that participants appreciated the chance of being part of a Virtual Exchange and considered that they had developed subject specific competences, particularly planning CLIL projects, teaching English for primary education and practicing their language skills. In addition, some of them transferred that knowledge to their eTwinning and Erasmus projects when in-service and highlighted the improvements in their intercultural communicative competence and their ability to teach it.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.