Abstract:

The paper presents a comparative analysis of two massive open online Academic Writing courses offered by Russian universities. Over the past decade, academic writing, in Russian as well as English, has become one of the top learning priorities in Russian universities. In 2012, the Russian government launched the so-called ‘Project 5-100’. The Project aims to bring a minimum of five Russian universities into at least one of the three most authoritative world university rankings. The goal is to be reached by fostering innovation, attracting international students and, more importantly, by increasing the research potential and boosting the employees’ science citation index in international databases, such as Scopus and Web of Science.

Although the Project currently unites only twenty-one universities in Russia (the overall number of tertiary education institutions in the country is 965), it has had an impact on the Russian tertiary education landscape on the whole, specifically, on teaching English. From now on, research papers were to be published in English rather than in Russian, to be accessible for the international academic community. Thus, responding to the need to promote Russian universities and boost their global recognition through an increase in citations, universities have incorporated academic writing classes into their curricula. Over the past decade, academic writing has come to dominate the English language teaching landscape in Russian universities.

Despite the rise in the number academic writing courses offered by Russian universities that the country has witnessed over the recent years, the curricula developers have run into a number of problems. One of the biggest challenges proved to be an immense cultural barrier and a clash of the Russian native academic writing tradition and the need to adopt the Anglo-Saxon tradition imposed by the international research universities.

This paper examines the cultural differences in the two traditions through content analysis of two Academic Writing MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) currently offered by Russian universities. The first course, Russian Academic Writing, is run by St Petersburg State University through Open Education, a Russian national MOOC platform. The course, which is delivered in Russian, targets Russian-speaking scientists and scholars and promotes the traditional Russian approach to academic writing. The second course, English for Research Publication Purposes, is offered in English by Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology on Coursera, and targets an international audience and is construed as an ‘international’ course.

By conducting a comparative content analysis of the two courses this paper aims at bridging the gap between the Russian and the international (Anglo-Saxon in origin) traditions of academic writing and scholarly publishing.

Keywords:

MOOC, academic writing, citation index, scholarly publishing, teaching writing, writing pedagogy.