Multilitteratus Incognitus

This past week, crazy events in Boston aside, two new MOOCs began: LTMOOC , on Blended Language Teaching, and the Phonetics and Phonology MOOC from the Virtual Linguistics Campus at the University of Marburg.  The Edx course on the Ancient Greek Hero took a hiatus week to allow people to catch up.  I am still sticking to the Ancient Greek Hero course, and I did try to catch up with the scrolls, a secondary reading that's meant to be "fast reading," but apparently I am not fast enough (I seem to be taking my time).  In any case, my strategy for the Edx course is to read the main reading, and participate in the course, and worry about the scrolls later. As far as the language MOOCs go, I decided to stick only with the Phonetics MOOC.  Blended learning is something that I already know about since I am an instructional designer, and given my applied linguistics background I can put 1 + 1 together; so with limited time and resources I opted to just keep an eye out on...

Last week I got an email from the MOOC guys running the VLC MOOC, and one of the topics was in the email was all about the certification process. In going through this MOOC (really a self-paced eLearning course, but more on that down below), I would like some sort of proof that I went through it (just in case someone asks), but by and large I really don't care for certification for individual courses. What I care about is the knowledge. Here is what I got from the VLC: Class Certification and Class End The class finishes on 31 May. Participants who have shown activity will be sent a certificate. We distinguish the following activities: - ActivityClass 0: no activity --> no certificate  - Activity Class 1: worksheet average < 60% --> confirmation of participation  - Activity Class 2: worksheet average >= 60% --> qualified certificate The certificates will be sent as E-Mail attachments in electronic form ready for printout. By the way, for the fut...

Well, now we're talking! ;-) I came across two MOOCs that are related to (one of) my subject(s) of study :-)  The first MOOC comes to us from Germany, although it looks like it will be conducted in English, and it's the Phonetics, Phonology and Transcription MOOC from the Virtual Linguistics Campus . I am actually quite psyched about this MOOC for several reasons: Phonetics and Phonology is something I've been wanting to undertake for a while, but haven't had the time; It uses a platform that I have not seen before, so I am curious on the technical end; It comes from a Non-English speaking country (I am interested in academic production in other languages, and how they are represented in MOOCs). Here is the intro video for the course: The second MOOC is LTMOOC (language teaching MOOC) which tackles the topic of blended language teaching. This probably won't be new to me (like the phonetics MOOC), but I signed up nevertheless because I am curious abo...