Language MOOCs (Language Massive Open Online Courses, or LMOOCs) are web-based online courses freely accessible for a limited period of time, created for those interested in developing their skills in a foreign language. As Sokolik (2014) states, enrolment is large, free and not restricted to students by age or geographic location. They have to follow the format of a course, i.e., include a syllabus and schedule and offer the guidance of one or several instructors. The MOOCs are not so new, since courses with such characteristics had been available online for quite a lot of time before Dave Cormier coined the term 'MOOC' in 2008. Furthermore, MOOCs are generally regarded as the natural evolution of OERs (open educational resources), which are freely accessible materials used in Education for teaching, learning and assessment.
Although there seem to be very few examples of LMOOCs offered by MOOC providers, authors, such as Martín-Monje & Barcena (2014), argue that these open online courses can be effectively designed to facilitate the development of communicative language competences in potentially massive and highly heterogeneous groups, whose main shared interest is to learn a foreign language. Scholarly research is equally incipient in the field, with only two monographs published to date on the topic. These volumes, considered milestones of the emerging field, are based upon work taken from the well-established discipline of CALL (computer-assisted language learning), which has long proven the suitability of TELL (technology-enhanced language learning).
History and emergence
The first LMOOCs started to appear in October 2012. Example courses include the three LMOOCs begun by the Spanish National Distance University (UNED). In relation to the English language, we have the LMOOC "Learn the first thousand words" (which had 45,102 students), and "Professional English" (with 33,588 students) and related to the German language, UNED offers the LMOOC "German for Spanish speakers" (with 22,438 students). The British Open University also started their Open Translation MOOC around the same time (they do not use the term "LMOOC" since it did not exist at that time). The course, "SpanishMOOC", integrated social media tools such as Skype and Google Hangouts in order to enhance synchronous oral interaction.
Another early example was Todd Bryant's joint launch of "English MOOC: Open Course for Spanish Speakers learning English" and "MOOC de Español: Curso abierto para hablantes de inglés que deseen mejorar su español" using his exchange website The Mixxer to connect language learners with native speakers for mutual exchanges. There have been some attempts to compile lists of LMOOC providers and available courses, but it seems like an impossible task to keep abreast of the constant changes in the MOOC panorama. Furthermore, LMOOCs seem to have received recently attention from governmental institutions and there is one European project that specifically focuses on LMOOCs, namely the LangMOOC project, as well as others, such as the ECO project, which include LMOOCs in their catalogue.
Architectonics
In order to be effective, Read (2015) argues that LMOOCs require a set of tools and technologies that are appropriate for students to train the relevant receptive and productive language skills as they would in real world communicative situations. The possibilities for such technological mediation depend on the type of LMOOC proposed. There are several types of courses identified in the literature, but the two most common ones are cMOOCs and xMOOCs. The former, inspired by the notions of open education (techniques and resources), do not run on a single platform (but are distributed across many), promote immersion and interaction. The latter usually represent a continuation of other types of e-Learning courses that institutions have undertaken and, therefore, have a similar course structure, following standard face-to-face educational models.