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Mining MOOCs to assist second language learners
Prof Ian Witten

This event took place on 28th September 2017 at 11:00am (10:00 GMT)
Knowledge Media Institute, Berrill Building, The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, MK7 6AA

MOOCs claim to offer access to affordable, quality education to anyone around the world. The language of instruction is invariably English, a second language for many students. MOOCs include extensive text in the style of academic language that characterizes the domain of study – law, business, science, technology, whatever – and constitute an ideal environment to improve writing skills. This talk will introduce, and demonstrate, the FLAX language learning environment, which uses external
resources (e.g. collocations) derived from massive text corpora to help students notice academic language features and adopt them in their own writing. FLAX has been used in conjunction with Law MOOCs from Harvard and University London on edX and Coursera.


The webcast was open to 300 users



(73 minutes)

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