Plenary Lecture
Foreign Language Open Online Course (FLOOC): What? Why and How?
Assistant Professor Nurkhamimi Zainuddin
Global Open Access Learning Centre (GOAL Centre)
Universiti Sains Islam
Malaysia
E-mail: khamimi@usim.edu.my
Abstract: One of the new teaching elements in higher education is increasingly focused on a format that meets three basic requirements: openness, massiveness and ubiquitous. These principles are emerging particularly in courses called Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Since 2011, a few studies have been conducted to explore the growth in open online courses such as Distributed Online Collaborative Courseware Courses (DOCC), Big Open Online Courses (BOOC), Synchronous Massive Online Courses (SMOC) and Small Private Online Courses (SPOC). However, to the best of authors’ knowledge, no report has been found so far using open online course to cater the needs of foreign language learners in terms of pedagogy, technicality and orthography. Foreign language learners with a transparent orthography, such as Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Greek and German, face fewer difficulties than readers in languages with non-transparent orthography such as English. Foreign language learners with a non-transparent orthography often depend on the lexical method, whereas this is unnecessary for readers in languages with transparent orthography. On the other hand, in languages with both types of orthography, such as Arabic and Hebrew, readers would behave depending on the type of orthography encountered. Since there is a gap in literature on this matter, this presentation would like to propose a Foreign Language Open Online Course (FLOOC) that will be useful to develop and support the foreign languages blended learning especially in non-native learners’ context. In light of these prospects, the presentation will describe the appropriate design principles for FLOOC design and development. This would substantially benefit foreign language learners and could help them obtain literacy skills and attain their potential.
Brief Biography of the Speaker: Nurkhamimi Zainuddin holds PhD in Computer Assisted Language Learning from International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). He is currently the Coordinator at Global Open Access Learning Centre in Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM) and staff at the Faculty of Major Languages. His research focus is on Teaching Arabic as a Second Language, Computer Aided Instructions and Instructional Technology. He also teaches Arabic at tertiary level and has also conducted trainings and workshops related to Instructional Design for educators. His papers have appeared in several chapters in book and conference proceedings locally and internationally. To date, Nurkhamimi is also actively involved in numerous research in the area of Open Editing, Arabic E-book Development, Online Discussion Assessment and Screen Capture. He has another on-going research concerning MOOC, OER, OCW and ODL. Instead, he's coined his own term FLOOC (Foreign Language Open Online Course.