Abstract

The aim of this article is to consider the use of MOOC Camps for teacher development. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have great potential for providing autonomous, high-quality professional teacher development at a low cost for their participants. However, MOOCs in general have some drawbacks. In many cases, they are no more than simple adaptations of traditional courses. Also, they have failed to meet their basic objective, which is to democratize access to higher education, as their main public is still from more developed countries. Other outstanding issues are assessment and recognition, validation, and accreditation. However, maybe the most serious problem faced by MOOC developers is the low rate course completion. One way these problems can be mitigated is to integrate MOOCs with more traditional classroom learning. MOOC Camps seem to be a good alternative, offering a blended solution, combining in-person, facilitated discussions with the free online courses. This participatory action research focuses on the effectiveness of a MOOC Camp project, a partnership between the American Embassy in Brazil and an extension and research project (CEALD) from a state university in Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). The text begins with an overview of the CEALD project and brief discussion about the use of MOOC Camps, followed by the description of the research methodology and analysis of the participants’ answers to the feedback questionnaire. The first results of this research show that these (future) teachers recognized that the facilitated sessions helped maintain their interest in the online courses and supported their language and methodology development.