by Chiara Ferrari, IPSOS, Italy
In our October issue, we discussed how the EMMA partnership is developing insight into how learners interact with the platform and what they expect to gain from the wide offer of MOOCs now available.
As our readers might remember, several of the unique features offered by EMMA were the subject of questions of particular interest for partners: one of them being the multilingual approach supported by the Automatic Speech Recognition and Machine Translation for audio and text material included in MOOC courses and provided by the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV).
For students enrolled in the October MOOCs, this is a positively attractive feature, as more than one half of them declare they are willing to take a course in English – 36% as a first choice and 48% as a second option – although their native language is mainly Italian or Spanish (54%).
The fact that all EMMA MOOCs are regularly administered in the original language and in English therefore represents an opportunity both for the partnership to widen the reach of the offer and for learners to practice a specific language while learning.
EMMA’s unique value proposition rests also on a variety of tools which allow students to combine materials from different sources, to create their own learning portfolio. This is why courses have been specifically selected as clustering around a discipline or topic: learners will thus be able to select content from different courses and build an individual course book, in this way they can design their own personal learning path.
Here again the results of the survey support the partners’ idea of offering a Personal Learning Environment: actually 36% of the students surveyed confirm that they will take this opportunity, by selecting and combining content coming from different courses and different teachers.
Now that the spring round of MOOCs has started, more insights are coming in about learners, courses and the platform and its features: we’ll share more of this in the next issues of our newsletter: stay tuned!