Use of LMS Moodle for blended learning of English

Information and communication technologies have become indispensable in view of the COVID-19 pandemic. All the schools and universities in Russia have adopted e-learning technologies. Perm State University has been successfully using Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (LMS MOODLE) as a tool to guarantee flexible efficient teacher-student and student-student interaction. The Department of English for Professional Communication of Perm State University has developed an LMS MOODLE course of Academic English for the second-year undergraduate science students. Before the official introduction in January 2020, the course has been tried in eleven educational groups (about 250 students). We conducted a survey among the sixty students and four teachers to evaluate the effectiveness of the course, advantages and disadvantages of blended learning and the amount of time needed in an average week. The main benefits of the course are absence of printed materials, permanent access to learning materials, interesting content and tasks, interactivity and elements of gamification, easy-to-use format, and a convenient way to send completed tasks, clear grading system, online testing with instant automatic evaluation and feedback, possibility of online collaborative learning. Among the difficulties encountered during the training period the respondents mentioned poor access to the Internet, technical problems, and evaluation of tests with "open " answers. The course developed in LMS MOODLE suggests a great variety of blended learning, by bridging between traditional teaching without e-learning and distance education. It can be adopted to various settings and easily updated.