Abstract:

Multilingual and multicultural skills are viewed as a communicative proficiency that is necessary for people to fully function in the 21st century, so multilingual education becomes the obvious political and technical response to these needs as language is clearly the main vehicle for the expression of culture. The literature states the need for mother-tongue instruction, as well as multilingual education. MOOCs were seen as a possible solution for fostering this kind of learning but existing European platforms did not address issues of linguistic and cultural diversity. Interest on the part of European Institutions to explore the potential of MOOCs for providing a more inclusive and multilingual education was confirmed by the funding of projects such as EMMA (http://www.europeanmoocs.eu). This paper looks at how EMMA is responding to the challenge, through provision of a platform for MOOC delivery that also functions as a multilingual and multicultural learning environment. This is achieved through embedded translation services and an experimental PLE. Ad hoc evaluation tools will serve to illustrate how learners behave in this environment and the impact of multilingualism.

Keywords:

MOOCs, multilingual.