Abstract:

Aalto University has an internationally rich and diverse student body of approximately 2700 international students representing over 100 countries. Aalto University welcomes nearly 1000 exchange students a year. Over 500 students start their Finnish studies yearly.

The target audience for the Finnish courses at Aalto University are foreign exchange and degree students. Most likely they don´t have any knowledge of the Finnish language prior to their arrival. Students who took the Survival Finnish face-to-face course at Aalto University indicated in their feedback that they found the Finnish language to be challenging because as a Finno-Ugric language, it differs greatly from the Indo-European languages, and it would have been highly beneficial for them to have an access to a Finnish online material prior to coming to Finland. To face our students´ needs we decided to edit our existing Massive Open Online Course Introductory Finnish Self Study and created an online credit course Survival Finnish Online targeted to Aalto students. In this, four-week course students learn basic structures and vocabulary with teaching videos and online exercises. Students can complete the exercises independently at their own speed. Nevertheless, a teacher is present to answer any questions.

To engage the students we have created teacher presence in many ways:
• Teachers of the course present themselves and the course content in a video on the opening page of the course.
• There are four sections and each section starts with an introduction video to the contents made by one of the teachers.
• In order to create coherence, the same teacher has made all the grammar videos.

The biggest challenge in the course, as in most online courses, is how to get the students to complete exercises on their own and keep up studying without dropping the course. After the first execution of the course, in August 2018, 49 of 177 students completed the course successfully which means that they completed 90 % of the course tasks. This means that the completion percentage was 28%. In order to increase the completion percentage, we added interaction between the students and between the students and teachers in several ways:
• We asked the students to introduce themselves in the discussion forum of the course already before the course started, so that the participants could contact each other and start networking.
• We teachers reacted right away to the students’ messages.
• Students and teachers started to provide links to relevant resources: useful videos, webpages, or course materials.
• We encouraged external networks and created a Facebook group where the students discuss about the course themes and Finnish language and culture in general in a more casual way. The group has over 750 members and the group receives regular posts by its members over two years after its creation.
• Certain activities that had been voluntary were now obligatory.
• We also started to remind students about different deadlines and course practicalities in an encouraging way in the discussion forum.

We were amazed to find out that the next course´s completion percentage in December 2018 was significantly higher, 50 %. In our presentation, we will show how we have been adding teachers´ presence and students´ interaction into an existing course and what benefits it has had.

Keywords:

Online language learning, Finnish, teacher presence, introductory Finnish MOOC, teaching Finnish online.