Development of a MOOC in a Japanese open university

Japanese leading universities and corporates have launched Japan Massive Open Online Course (jMOOC, http://www.jmooc.jp/en/) Consortium in November 2013. As a founding member, the Open University of Japan (OUJ) developed MOOCs in order to release them as the initial courses. One of the courses is for the starter (A1) level of Japanese language education, which is based on a CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages)-oriented curriculum standard developed by the Japan Foundation (JF). The learner interface is two kinds of multimedia e-textbook formats (i.e. iBook version and epub version) and a learning management system (LMS) is operated in the backend in order to record the data in each learning process. The functions of registration and learner community are constructed by utilizing a SNS service, Facebook. One of the concepts of OUJ-MOOC is “joint and scalable”. In this presentation, the characteristics of the courseware and the issues discussed at thedevelopment will be introduced.