I've signed up for a fair few free online courses in my time, but I've never completed a single one of them. The whole virtual community around them is just too big and unfamiliar. So I wondered about maybe setting up a study group with people here, to help chum each other through a language-based course. It would feel a bit more... human. I've just started doing a course on corpus linguistics, which I studied previously, ten years ago. It might seem a bit removed from what we do as learners, but it does offer a great tool for investigating things we see and hear in our new languages. (Although I must admit I've only ever used a foreign corpus once or twice, but I've used but English corpus a reasonable number of times to inform my teaching.) What will be interesting to most of you, though, is the course Understanding Language: Learning and Teaching which starts in November. Like most free courses, it's intended as an advert for a paid course (in this case a Masters programme in English Language Teaching) but that means they'll be trying to impress you with how good their material is. Anyway, so who's up for it? If there's enough people interested, maybe Big_Dog would set up a subforum for the study group to operate in?