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Speakers: Dr Mara Fuertes & Dr Zsuzsanna Barkanyi

Abstract:

The aim of the MOOC2move Project (Erasmus+ Project founded by the Council of Europe) has been to enhance cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices that help university students on the move to develop and support plurilingualism. In this presentation we will report on the two runs of the Language MOOC Learn Academic Spanish designed by the Open University in collaboration with the University of Alicante. The course had two pedagogical foci: teaching academic Spanish, a requirement for successful study at a Spanish-speaking university, as well as to improve students’ study skills. The launch of the first edition of the MOOC in April 2020 has allowed our partner university to face with greater resources the digital transformation of education produced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequently, the contents of the MOOC have been transformed into OER in order to be able to take advantage of its materials in the future.

Speakers:

Dr Mara Fuertes Gutiérrez is the Head of Spanish at the Open University. Mara has experience in teaching Spanish, Linguistics and Research Methods applied to languages in Higher Education and she regularly teaches on Teacher Training Programmes. Over her career, Mara has conducted extensive research in the areas of Teaching and Learning Spanish, Historiography of Linguistics, Linguistic Typology and Sociolinguistics. Currently, she is co-leading the Diasporic identities and politics of language teaching strand of the AHRC-funded Language Acts and Worldmaking project and  leading the Erasmus+ Project MOOC2Move. She is the Membership Secretary of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association of Spanish in Society.

Dr Zsuzsanna Bárkányi has a keen interest in the spoken side of language, speech technology and online and mobile learning. She joined the Open University as a Lecturer in Spanish in 2016. She has chaired L194, the Beginners’ Spanish Course and worked on L226, L336 and L106 Productions. She was Head of Spanish in 2017/18 and Lead Educator on the Spanish for Beginners Programme and Academic Spanish on FutureLearn. Before joining the Open University, she was a Speech Linguistics Project Manager at Google’s text-to-speech synthesis team from 2015. Zsuzsanna’s research interests lie in the interface of phonetics and phonology, L2 pronunciation and Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety.