CECL and CENTAL members team up!

Read their publication to learn about the impact of language proficiency on MOOC performance.

In this day and age, few can say they’ve never taken part in an online course. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on platforms like EdX and Coursera have been claimed to democratize education, offering open access to students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and geographical loca­tions. However, research sug­gests that this potential may have been overstated, partially because many of the courses are taught in English, which presents a language barrier for non-native speakers of English. At the same time, MOOCs offer various ways for students to interact via discussion forums and develop learning strategies to deal with video materials, for example by giving them the option to change the rate of speech, pause, seek backward or forward etc. For this study, the CECL and the CENTAL joined hands to investigate whether interactions with videos and forums can help non-native speakers of English perform better in English-taught MOOCs. Crucially, low-proficiency non-native speakers of English were found to benefit more from rewatching parts of video content, but most of them do not make sufficient use of video functionalities to fully benefit from their potential.

Dubois, T., D. De Meyere, P. Watrin, and M. Paquot. 2026. “The Impact of Language Proficiency on MOOC Performance: Insights From Video Interactions and Forum Participation.” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 42, no. 6: e70338. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcal.70338.