Designing an academic Italian LMOOC for Slavic-speaking students

The upcoming of massive open online education has offered a great potential in the field of language learning, particularly in the context of higher education and lifelong learning. The peculiar characteristics of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) pose challenges for designing effective language learning pathways though. This paper aims to overcome these challenges by analysing the design process of an LMOOC4Slav, an Academic Italian Language MOOC for Slavic-speaking university students, at a macro- and micro-design level. Its goal is to present a methodological proposal for projecting the online learning path for this specific target group as part of Erasmus+ project “Romance languages for Slavic-speaking university students”. Starting with the learners’ needs analysis, a questionnaire was administered to 209 Slavic students in Italy (L2) and in Slavic-speaking countries (FL). Taking into consideration the linguistic difficulties of Slavic students in learning Italian that emerged from the survey, the project proposes some solutions, while facilitating the development of linguistic fluency in academic contexts.