Abstract
The aim of this presentation is to consider the use of camps for teacher development. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) has shown to be a potential autonomous way of offering high quality professional teacher development with low cost for their participants However, MOOCs in general have presented some drawbacks as well. First, in many cases, they are simple adaptations of traditional courses. Second, they have failed to meet their basic objective, which is to democratize access to higher education, as their main public is still from the highly-developed countries. Other issues to be considered are assessment and recognition, validation, and accreditation. However, maybe the most serious problem faced by MOOC developers is the low rate which students complete the courses. Therefore, a possible way of minimizing these problems is to incorporate MOOCs to more traditional classroom environment. 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 analyzing the effectiveness of a MOOC camp project, a partnership between the American Embassy in Brazil and an extension project (CEALD) from a state university in Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). The talk begins with a brief presentation on how MOOC camps work, followed by an analysis of 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 support their language and methodology development.
Presenters
Janaina CardosoAssociate Professor, Anglo-Germanic Languages Dept; Linguistics Dept, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
MOOC, Camps, Teacher, Development, Blending, Methodology, Awareness, Facilitated, Sessions, Language
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