With the advent of “Internet+” era,the reform of education has entered a new filed,in which Massive Open Online Course(MOOC),as a new teaching mode,has been developed rapidly around the world.However,the low completion and high dropout rate of the online courses are criticized.In 2013,Small Private Online Course(SPOC),proposed by Professor Armando Fox from University of California at Berkeley,was applied in Harvard University and University of California Berkeley in terms of blended learning,which achieved desirable teaching effect.As an emerging course mode in the Post-MOOC Era,SPOC tends to integrate MOOC into traditional classroom teaching by limiting numbers of learners and imposing entry requirements,which represents future development of MOOC.The previous research is more concerned about the SPOC teaching model,and the researchers believe that such a teaching model is conducive to improving learner participation,interaction and course completion rate.Nevertheless,there is little research focusing on the profile of the implementation of SPOC.The subjects in this study are students who have participated in the independent and synchronous SPOC “Practical English Writing for International Communication”(PEWIC)and 5 teachers who have taught this course.The study,which is conducted by the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods,uses SPSS 21.0 and ROST Content Mining System 6.0 to analyze the data from students’ satisfaction questionnaires,students’ and teachers’ interviews and course evaluation on the SPOC platform.This study aims to answer the following three questions:(1)What is the profile of the implementation of the SPOC PEWIC?(2)Are the learners who registered SPOC PEWIC satisfied with the course?(3)What is the teachers’ attitude towards the SPOC PEWIC?The results show that:(1)Students who registered independent or synchronous SPOC have achieved desirable results,as well as performed relatively well in each task module.The learners’ course participation rate is high,and the task module with the highest participation rate is the discussion section.In regard to the rate of learning persistence,it fluctuates greatly,which reveals a high trend in the early and late stages,and a low trend in the middle.The reaching-standard rate is comparatively optimistic which indicates that more than 70% of the learners complete the corresponding learning tasks and meet the basic requirements of the course.(2)In general,the students are satisfied with the course.During the learning process,their top concerns are teacher-student interaction,teachers and assignments.In addition,the satisfaction with the course resources and course design are most relevant to overall satisfaction.However,in terms of learning experience,the learners also indicate that the setting of deadlines,the normalization of peer review,the way of notification,and the interaction between teachers and students have yet to be improved.(3)According to the teachers,the course has reached the teaching goal as a whole and the completion rate is high.At the same time,they speak highly of course design,teacher-student interaction,teaching method “from general to specific” and arrangements to solve students’ doubts.However,they also suggest that the setting of deadlines,the intensity of course promotion,the policy support and the normalization of peer review still need to be strengthened.At the same time,this research,based on the research results,puts forward some suggestions for course improvement which can provide guidance for the later management and maintenance of the course,and also lay a solid theoretical and practical foundation for the future evaluation of SPOC.However,there are still several inadequacies can be observed in this research:(1)This study only analyzes part of the background data.If the data can be comprehensively analyzed,the results of the study will get improved.(2)This study proposes some suggestions for course improvement which have already been applied in the later courses,but the application effect has not been analyzed. |