Welcome from World Learning – SIT Graduate Institute

Hello and welcome to the MOOC Content-Based Instruction, or CBI, brought to you by World Learning
and SIT Graduate Institute, which is a part of World Learning. My name is Dr. Kara McBride, and I was
the lead designer for this course. I’m really excited that we’re able to open this course up as a MOOC for
a worldwide audience. I think you’re going to get a lot out of this MOOC.

This course was designed for people who are teaching now – or plan to teach – English as a foreign
language through content courses, such as science, math or history. We call this content-based
instruction. It’s also known in many circles with the acronym CLIL, or content and language integrated
learning. We’re considering these equivalent terms for this MOOC.

Since contexts do vary quite a bit, in this course, what we’re going to teach you are decision-making
skills and problem-solving skills so that you are able to design and teach lessons that work the best for
the students you are working with.

Let’s talk about what’s in the MOOC!

It has five modules. Module 1 will introduce CBI and introduce some basic concepts and terms for CBI;
you’ll also be doing a very interesting activity that will help give you a perspective on what it is like to be
a CBI student; and in that same module, we’ll be talking about the role of vocabulary in CBI.

Next, in Module 2, we’re going to be focusing on content – how to teach content – and what we can do
to help our students learn new concepts and new ideas through scaffolding. We’ll also be talking about
learning objectives and open educational resources.

In Module 3, we’re going to focus on language and talk about when do we do explicit language
instruction in CBI. Specifically, we’ll look at helping our students with their academic writing skills, with
their reading comprehension, and their listening comprehension.

Next, in Module 4, we’re going to broaden the view even more. Having talked about content and
language, now we’re going to look at some other factors that we need to be aware of. These include
culture and emotion. While we’re talking about some of these issues, we’ll be talking about is it ever
okay to let our students speak their first language – their native language – in class? And we’ll look at
some techniques for keeping our students in the target language (which in our case is English) when
they’re in class.

Finally, in Module 5, we’ll be talking about assessment and error correction, with the idea of making

© 2019 by World Learning. Welcome from World Learning – SIT Graduate Institute for the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored
by the U.S. Department of State and administered by FHI 360. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 License, except where noted. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This is a program of the U.S. Department of State

administered by FHI 360 and delivered by World Learning


assessments that are fair and accurate, and error correction that supports learning.

How does that sound? Before you get into it, let me just say a few words about the structure of the
MOOC.

The MOOC goes in a very particular order. You need to go from Activity 1 to Activity 2 and so on to
advance. You can’t just leap to Activity 9, for example. What you can do is at any point in the MOOC,
while it’s still open, you can go to previous activities in the MOOC.

We estimate that participation in this MOOC will take around four hours of work per week to continue
advancing in the MOOC. If you have limited internet connection, you may want to download the module
packets. The module packets are PDF files that contain all of the material of each module, except the
quizzes. You have to be online to take the quizzes.

You also have to be online to participate in the discussions. There is usually one, sometimes two
discussions per module. These are wonderful opportunities for sharing ideas with educators all over the
world. We would also like to suggest that you share some of the ideas and new thoughts you get from
this course with your colleagues locally, not just in the online forums.

So, are you ready to learn and share? We hope so! We hope you really enjoy this MOOC and we’ll see
you online!

This is a program of the U.S. Department of State

administered by FHI 360 and delivered by World Learning