EdX-Learning: A Genre and Discourse Analysis of Online University Courses in Economics

The development of the Internet has made new possibilities available for the organization of academic activities and practices, and new web-mediated textual resources by which to adjust traditional scholarly genres to multimedia environments. Among them, massive open online courses (MOOCs), in particular, are specifically designed to offer university courses to a global audience of learners. The study examines the virtual education platform edX (a MOOCs provider), focussing on a selection of Economics and Finance courses offered by initiatives HarvardX and MITX, from a genre analytical and multimodal perspective. In particular, the paper discusses how the features of academic English and the genre of the academic business lecture can be integrated in order to meet addressees' expectations in the online communicative environment, especially in terms of recurring macrostructure and possible variation. The chapter also includes a pilot study aimed at exploring students' perception of online-delivered courses, which indicates a clear preference for courses engaging them in project-based learning and authentic tasks, thus having immediate professional application and developing problem-solving abilities.