The Role of Tutor in Massive Social Language Learning: A Case Study of an Academic Italian MOOC

With online distance learning a new figure of tutor has emerged, aimed at supporting students in the learning process and stimulating interaction and socialization among peers, its role resulting crucial in favouring the course completion and preventing the drop-out phenomena. The tutor presence proves to be essential to stimulate and guide communication between students in the forum and it can promote autonomous and collaborative language learning. While some MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) developers minimalize the role of tutor, both instructors and participants underline the need for teacher presence in this particular learning environment, though some more research is still needed in this field. The paper aims to investigate how to guide massive social language learning so as to reduce the decline of activity, thus enhancing active participation aimed at developing learner linguistic skills. The case study of Academic Italian for Slavic-Speaking Students Language MOOC is presented, the course first and second edition being delivered in the tutored mode on the EduOpen platform. The relation between student forum performance and student-tutor interaction has been investigated to verify the conditions required for potentiating the social dimension of language learning. Additional data extracted from the learning system activity logs as well as the post-course questionnaire results have been reported so as to observe the invisible side of the course dynamics and learners’ satisfaction with tutor assistance and feedback. The data analysis has helped to understand how online learning process takes place and how to facilitate participant interaction in Language MOOCs. Some problematic areas that need improvement have been identified, such as passive forum participation and the lack of communicative interactions between learners, the role of tutor resulting crucial in addressing these two issues. Thus an innovative approach for managing online interaction in tutor-supported MOOCs has been proposed for the course next iteration.