A Study on the Effectiveness of College English Blended Learning Under MOOCs Philosophy in China

Introduction

China’s rapid economic development and increasing trades with the world, particularly the recent implementation of “The Belt and Road Initiative” policy, has made English learning unprecedentedly important in the country. The Chinese government has made it clear in the newly-launched the “Medium and long-term National Education Reforms and Development Plan (2010-2020)” that promoting educational reform and equality has become core tasks in English education and that great efforts should be made to the effective cohesion of information technology into curriculum in higher education.

College English is a compulsory course for non-English majors in China, undergraduate and graduate. Its objective is to foster students’ English language competence in an all-round way. It also aims to provide them with effective means for communications and lifelong learning strategies so that they can learn independently, collaboratively and creatively to continuously cultivate themselves key competencies for the 21^st century even after graduation.

In the year 2004 and 2007, the national Ministry of Education issued “College English Curriculum Requirements” (“Requirements” hereafter), a guideline for English education, particularly for non-English majors. And in the year 2015, with the assistance of a pool of top educational experts nationwide, the national Ministry of Education issued another “Guidelines for College English Education” (“Guidelines” hereafter). It encourages deeper innovations in college English education, in particular, the adoption of blended learning and further application of Micro lecture and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs hereafter). Ever since the Requirements was issued in 2004, great changes in college English education have been made in curriculum design, teaching models, evaluation and teacher development (Zhao et al., 2014; Xu, 2015).

However, innovations of college English education in China is by no means easy. It meets with challenges, and the learning environment is perhaps the biggest one. It is generally accepted that English is a foreign language instead of a second language in China. Compared with their counterparts in L2 countries, such as Canada and Singapore, Chinese college English learners have comparatively limited language input outside the classroom. Surprisingly, a lot of key universities in China have been deducting the course credits of college English, mainly because, as surveys show, students are becoming increasingly discontented with what they have learned from the course (Cai, 2011; Wang, 2009; Fen, 2010; He et al., 2012). And the rise of MOOCs constitutes another challenge for college English education. By giving college English learners brand new online and offline blended learning experiences and interactions with peers and instructors in virtual learning communities, as well as giving them access to high quality learning resources from prestigious universities, MOOCs have paved a new way for language learning and pressed for re-innovation and further cohesion of information technology into the curriculum.

The educational effectiveness and improvement research develop rapidly in recent decades. It has three research areas, and the school effectiveness research centers upon describing factors that affect the learning outcomes of the students (Chapman et al., 2015). Different kinds of e-learning as MOOCs, crowdsourcing and social networks have made it necessary the identification and isolation of critical factors for educational effectiveness. College English blended learning, with combination of both online and offline education, seeks to improve the educational effectiveness and tackles the challenges facing e-learning effectiveness, i.e. students’ motivation, sense of isolation and impersonal (Montebello, 2018).