For obvious reasons (and that being stated as a start) I will not post any links, videos oder other sources at this point. For me, this MOOC is featuring multimodal communication. We are learning with videos (combination of audio and visual meanings), which show our teachers using orality (talking), gestures and mimicry. There are diagrams involved as well as writing, we do have the possibility to add subtitles, and there transcripts of the videos. So there is written text as well, even though transcripts are somewhat different from other written texts. There are readings sections within the MOOC, and there might be some audio sections coming up (which I do not know yet). We are encouraged to interact via discussions and to do assignments and reviews. So there is interaction:

• interaction based on the videos we watch
• interaction based on the texts we read
• interaction between us learners in written discussions (Is that written meaning or oral meaning? Usually chats and e-mail are in terms of conventions and politeness and such somewhere in the middle, as having a set of rules on their own right.)
• interaction between us learners in assignments and the peer reviews
• interaction between the providers of this MOOC and us learners resulting in a certificate as evidence of the interaction

I find MOOCs pretty interesting on this point, having done some others before. Some of them work basically through reading sections and audio files. Others are using videos, simple university lectures being taped, not including diagrams and written texts, but literally showing someone talking on and on. Others are, like this one here, a fusion of all kinds of communication or channels. There are even some old fashioned study modules working singularly on books being send to students, so that people can learn only out of written texts, mostly without diagrams. What is the best way to study? Written language alone does not do the job, obviously. This MOOC here is using quite a lot of different channels, so that learning is kind of multisensual und multimodal. The more modes are working together to create a learning environment which is consistent and in itself, the clearer the contents become to the learners, I would think. But then, there are learners who learn better on the visual channel, and others who are better on the audio channel and still others who prefer to simply read, who focus on written meaning. So there is no mode to really transport meaning in one best way, but simply multiple ways which should be used together.

Traditional notions of literacy always left those behind who are not that strong on writing and reading. Especially the learners with special needs, children and adults on the Dyslexia or Autism Spectrum, profit big deal of multimodal communication which is so rich in comparision to more traditional ways of learning and teaching. Literacy, the ability to read and write, to deal meanings hidden in symbols, is where learning traditionaly starts. It should start elsewhere. Because literacy is, when a nursery rhyme transports meaning. Because reading books to children transports meaning and is in itself different from reading texts silently to oneself. Because literacy includes staged pieces of drama (which are traditionally read and interpreted in language lessons rather than watched on stage or staged). Because literacy includes telling fairy tales without reading them from a book. Because comic strips can be read, even if they are created without a single word, leave alone written words. That is why pictograms work in a globalised world, without everybody knowing English language. Literacy works in ways apart from language (and the connected sets of letters, hieroglyphs, kana, kanji, moji and whatever people use to visualise and preserve oral language).

Research pinned down that children are thinking mainly in sensual impressions before they have language. Learning language therefore would include thinking in abstract sounds instead of sensations. There is an abstraction taking place, to convert sensations into the sounds of words, phrases, sentences, texts. Now when children learn to read and write (which would be the strict meaning of the word literacy), they have to abstract further and convert the sounds into what we call letters. The latest now they would not be able to access early childhood memories which are, as said above, not stored in the mode of language, but sensual. Now what would happen if we put literacy off that traditional path, understand it as a matter of meaning and knowledge and start to teach (transfer) that meaning via non-language based modes?