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MOOC are an innovation which began in higher education institutions, and most MOOC knowledge is still located in (or supported by) academia. In a business context the interest in MOOC is often more pragmatic, and has a different focus. Our general advice for introducing MOOC in the workplace is as follows:
- Carefully select your course topic: is it appropriate to be learnt via the MOOC format? Does it make sense to be taught to a critical mass of business learners (is there a need)? Does it facilitate key business competences and career-related motives?
- Identify your target group´s expectations because this can implications for the professional appearance of the platform, videos, usability, design, etc. and quality standards
- Ensure an easy sign-up procedure
- Provide the option for learners/employees to stay anonymous in the MOOCs: build trust from the beginning. Sharing can still happen without giving away names of people and organizations.
- Monitoring participants’ activity, inputs and comments can offer useful data/analytics which can enable further improvements to the MOOC, focused moderation and upcoming MOOCs for target business participants.
- Convince the key decision-makers in companies by preparing a strategy to introduce your MOOC concept: ensure it is aligned to company strategy and work on the key selling points and benefits
- Be aware your stakeholders might not be familiar with MOOCs, and might lack some digital and language & terminology) skills next to prior knowledge, etc.
- Check the adaptability your MOOC. Could the MOOC be reworked to fit a company learning program/catalogue and/or aligned/adapted to a company competence framework? Can the (tailored) MOOC become part of the official training program of a company? A closed operating environment section for the company within the open MOOC could help to address confidentiality and legal issues. Establish whether your MOOC concept is a complementary or supplemental offering.
After reflecting on our own experiences as MOOC providers, we make the following recommendations:
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In our experience MOOCs for companies are successful, especially when offered in a hybrid training model format, complementing the corporate training program or supplementing corporate offerings.
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MOOCs can compete with other proprietary business training, not only because they are for free, but also because they enable learners to potentially connect with many working professionals around the world and produced by quality providers like Higher Education Institutions.
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The majority of our learners came with career-related motives, especially to improve skills & to learn new things (more than 70% in all MOOCs).
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Some of the MOOC enrolment procedures elicited negative learner feedback regarding the number of steps and provision of personal data needed to enrol. This which might put off some registrations from business learners.
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We observed that MOOCs can be a great way to introduce a massive audience to a new topic/idea, and then follow up with a complementing, tailored offline or blended format.
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Many identified key barriers in our research at the beginning of the project (legal limitation, confidentiality issues, technical issues) were not observed during our facilitation of the Pilot MOOCs. This is perceived to be due to the fact our MOOC were not “official” company offerings.
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According to our research, still many companies simply don’t trust MOOCs yet, so it is important to build trust through professionalism.
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It is important to keep available the option to stay anonymous when taking MOOCs.
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Finally, the real added value of a MOOC compared to other learning formats, could be the power of the cloud, the aggregation of knowledge around a topic by a massive amount of learners and experts with different cultural backgrounds.