Learn Spanish: Basic Spanish for English Speakers
Institution: Universitat Politècnica de Valencia (edX)
Date: September 15, 2015 - Self Paced
Bio: A 16 week language course that covers what you would expect of a Spanish 101 course; some basic vocabulary, grammar, and simple phrases allowing learners to have basic conversations in Spanish. It delivers this through a wide variety of video lectures (given in Spanish with optional subtitles), audio files, written content, and a large amount of interactive exercises.
The course is open year round and allows the student to pursue it at their own pace. Students can cram all of the lessons into one month, or spread it out over several months as their schedule permits.
One of the surprises in the course was the large variety of interactive exercises they were able to produce with creative use of the edX platform tools. They made use of conjugation drop downs, fill in the blanks, responding to or comprehension of audio conversations, drag and drop word groupings, and more.
The only down side is that all of the exercises are static, such that after you've attempted them once you can't generate new problems if you need additional practice or want to avoid inadvertently brute forcing some of the multiple choice problems.
Accomplishments: The course assessment is a comprehensive final at the end of the course covering the entire curriculum. You have limited attempts to answer each question, but there is no time restraint so you can review material after seeing the questions. I passed the course with a 97%.