Second language writing in a MOOC: Affordances and missed opportunities

MOOCs (massive open online courses) promise higher education to participants who cannot travel to or pay for face-to-face classes. In 2013, a new MOOC introduced second language (L2) learners to concepts of English language academic writing. The authors of this article participated in the course as students and kept a reflective diary, which we analyzed qualitatively from a perspective of multimodal design. We describe the instructional modes present in the course and discuss the ways the course utilized affordances of those modes. We argue that while the course design provided linguistic input and fostered interaction among participants, it missed opportunities to utilize some multimodal affordances of the MOOC platform for supporting peer response and developing a learner community, thus limiting students' potential to learn English academic writing.