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Teaching the University ESP Course with the MOOC Component: Putting Ideas into Practice
This paper studies the results of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) integration into the ESP course curriculum at the Department of Business Informatics of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE). The author investigated whether MOOCs can be effectively integrated into the teaching-learning process and bring significant benefits to students such as developing their linguistic and professional competences. A survey and the results of the experimental teaching revealed that HSE students highly appreciated their experience of online education and would definitely continue to explore the scope of MOOCs in the future. Research findings illustrate that embedding MOOCs into the university ESP course could become the basis for the integrated study of special subjects and the English language in the international learning community under the condition that on-campus courses have been re-designed to incorporate MOOC-like components. MOOCs can be considered as a valuable educational resource for information technology specialists, which can be beneficially used by both students and ESP instructors.