Innovative Methods and Practices of Academic Writing and Writing Instruction
THE CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF NEW LITERACY SPACES: HOW MOOCS AND FLIPPED CLASSROOMS HAVE IMPACTED SECOND LANGUAGE COMPOSITION TEACHING
Joel Bloch
Independent scholar (retired), Shawnee Hills Ohio, USA
Massive Open Online courses (MOOCs) and flipped classrooms are online classes that have become popular and controversial. MOOCs are pure online courses where sometimes thousands of participants can work together on a common subject. Flipped classrooms are hybrid, part classroom and part online classes, where many of the traditional classroom activities occur outside the classroom. They share technologies and pedagogies that need to be modified for the different contexts in which these courses are offered. Both incorporate videos, for example, to shift teacher lectures online so that students can watch them. They can also take advantage of traditional pedagogies, such as peer review in different ways. These approaches exemplify the latest evolution in technologicallyenhanced composition teaching by creating new learning spaces for engaging students by exploiting the mobility and flexibility of the participants, so they can gain more autonomy over their learning experiences, which allows them to use various linguistic and rhetorical forms, creating a true multilingual environment. This paper examines the design of these two approaches, comparing their advantages and disadvantages for L2 composition teaching. First, I discuss my research on the first composition MOOCs and on my own flipped classrooms to show not only how the students and teachers negotiate these learning spaces but also how problematic practices could be remediated. Such research can help better understand these new directions for composition teaching as well as the impact of new technologies on the writing process.
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