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Despite being a relatively new phenomenon, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have started to be employed not just within the Higher Education system, but also within a corporate context for recruiting, the training of new employees, Human Resource Development (HRD), marketing, and even brand awareness (Grossman, 2013; Iversity, 2015; Radford et.al., 2015; Sreeleakha & Manikandan, 2015).

The evolution of information and communication technologies (hereinafter ICT) has led to fast paced developments and changes for online learning education/training (Fasihuddin, Skinner & Athauda, 2013). In today’s globalized world, knowledge-based economy with dynamic progress places competitiveness as a relevant element for many countries and sectors. Both competition and information sharing are the drivers of the knowledge-based economy (Zhang, 2003).

In fact, more than 100 elements are considered as determinants of productivity, fundamental for improving competitiveness. These factors are grouped by the World Economic Forum in the Global Competitiveness Report into 12 pillars: institutions, infrastructure, macroeconomic environment, health and primary education, higher education and training, goods market efficiency, labour market efficiency, financial market development, technological readiness, market size, business sophistication, and innovation. According to the stage of development of the economy, each one of these factors are more or less relevant.

Under the recent evolution of business and ICT, technological readiness, business sophistication and innovation are crucial for the economic development (Schwab, 2015). By technological readiness, the agility to adopt existing technologies for improving the productivity is meant, especially regarding the capacity to fully leverage ICTs in the activities and production processes. This way, efficiency is improved and innovation is enhanced. Having access to advanced products and blueprints and the ability to absorb and use them is crucial for the firms aiming to be successful.

Higher education and training are generally highly relevant, but business sophistication and innovation are playing a very important role, especially in the case of countries that already have exhausted, to a large extent, the more basic sources of productivity improvements as the first 10 pillars considered in the Global Competitiveness Report (Schwab, 2015).

Fostering Innovation

The quality of business networks is extremely relevant as opportunities for innovation in processes and products are easier to be created when companies and suppliers are taking advantage of efficient networks. Under these circumstances, entry barriers in the market are reduced allowing this way the entrance of new firms.

Innovation is a particularly important aspect, because it is about approaching the frontiers of knowledge. Nowadays, firms aiming to maintain a competitive edge and move toward even higher value-added activities must design and develop cutting-edge products and processes. For this reason, the World Economic Forum underlines that the involvement of both public and private sectors in creating a special environment is necessary, i.e. facilitating the following three main aspects:

• The presence of high-quality scientific research institutions able to generate the basic knowledge needed to build the new technologies;
• Large collaboration in research and technological developments between universities and industry;
• and the protection of intellectual property.

Within the context of the recent economic crisis and the subsequent political agenda austerity measures were requested by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund to a large amount of countries, especially Europeans. These measures affected particularly education, research and development field due to the budgetary reduction. Therefore, education has rise in cost since 2009 onwards whilst also, unfortunately, in some cases decreased in quality (OECD, 2012, 2013b). The consequences of this context are not confined to education.

Addressing Labour Market Trends

Additionally, the labour market has shifted in many countries. Unemployment has soared, in particular youth unemployment, which was, and still is in some cases, concerning. In fact, youth unemployment seems to keep policy makers awake at night (OECD, 2013a). Solutions to unemployment are not easy to design or to implement when the economy is facing cascade drawbacks (as in the period 2009-2016) and when expectations of the society are above the possibilities due to the labour market status before the recent crisis compared to the one of today. In this sense, labour policy and its reform had a determinant impact on labour market across Europe.

This new and (potentially) unstable economic situation has led towards shifts in the education system with a renewed focus on developing curriculum to be responsive to the labour market. ICT has allowed many people to access education.  MOOCs are “not the first occurrences of either a potential disruptive technology or distance learning“, and they “do not seem to be the last of either one” (Treadway, Ayala & Dicke, 2013). In fact, MOOCs could be employed for designing a strategic opportunity/solution to meet local requirements through enhancing related skills and capabilities (Patru & Balaji, 2016). It is therefore anticipated that MOOCs, by building new learning/training routes towards tertiary education and by providing lifelong learning opportunities, are well placed to provide skills training that aligns to labour market requirements. In fact, MOOCs for the world of business are already among two out of six trends for MOOCs (Shah, 2018a): The share of professional learners in MOOCs is significantly growing and we see a stronger uptake of corporate training by companies.

Another learner survey carried out by Class Central (Shah, 2017) outlines that 52% of learners are taking MOOCs to upgrade their skills for the current job and 49% to open up new career pathways. When asked about potential benefits realized by a MOOC, more than 50% listed job-related benefits (such as improved performance at a current job, getting a new job or earn a promotion).

The Role of Policy

MOOCs have huge potential that should be exploited and facilitated by governments for accelerating and ensuring social cohesion as well as sustainable growth (Nisha & Senthil, 2015). In this sense, Patru & Balaji (2016) consider that policy makers should consider triggering:

• On one hand and given the knowledge-base economy, innovation and improvement of education through open and online education. In this sense, MOOCs could be an excellent option for promoting lifelong learning;
• On the other hand, unemployment might be also tackled by matching the needs of the labour market and the skills and aptitudes of the majority of university graduates. Also in this case, MOOCs can be (at least partially) a good solution.

Those requests are also in line with studies carried by Calonge & Shah (2016) and CEDEFOP (2015) that conclude that MOOCs constitute viable opportunities to support labour market-relevant skill development.

Stimulated by the prospect of global recognition and huge numbers of international learners, more and more higher education institutions (hereinafter HEIs) are providing MOOCs. Consequently, the number of MOOCs available is still increasing. By the end of 2015, approximately 4,200 courses were offered by 500+ universities to 35 million students. This has increased by 2016 to 6,850 courses by over 700 universities to 58 million students (Class Central, 2016) and jumped to 9,400 courses catered to 81 million students in 2017 (Class Central, 2018; note, that those numbers only include the platforms and courses listed on Class Central). The growth is to some extent related to efforts of European institutions. Jansen & Goes (2016) report that four independent surveys indicate that over 45 per cent of HEIs in Europe intend to offer MOOCs. This is in contrast to the USA where the number of HEIs that either offer a MOOC or plan to do so has remained stable at 12-13 per cent for the last three years (Allen & Seaman, 2016). This raises the question why so many European institutions are involved and how MOOCs are used for lifelong learning opportunities and the business training needed. The latter is part of the BizMOOC project and to some extent addressed in this report.

Despite the fact that MOOCs are offering a complete course free of charge by definition, there are monetary costs and benefits associated with it. Several stakeholders are associated with the creation and the distribution of MOOCs as well as research and further services beyond the course itself. The diversity of MOOCs and players behind it makes it thus difficult to apply a universal business model to MOOCs. The rapid growth in the MOOC market leads to the influx of new stakeholders, bringing in new services, sponsorships, customers, cross-financing models etc. in the whole world of MOOCs. Currently, there is also a trend towards an increasing amount of corporations using MOOCs or the format of MOOCs for professional development activities, which might not only increase the revenues and business opportunities in the market substantially, but also challenge the open education approach. Again, Class Central recently announced, that MOOCs finally become “big business” (Shah, 2018b), based on announcements by big players such as Udacity and Coursera. The question stays if this is true for all institutions or only some big players.

As well as in the case of HEIs, the reason of developing MOOCs is not the immediate achievement of profits, but using them as a tool for various objectives. Jansen & Schuwer (2015) report that the most dominant objective is to increase institutional visibility and using MOOCs for reputation reasons. But also using MOOCs as innovation area (e.g., improve quality of on campus offering, contribute to the transition to more flexible and online education, improve teaching) and responding to the demands of learners and societies are indicated as important objectives.

Summary

Despite the fact that MOOCs are a still recent phenomenon of the past seven years, they are more and more used in the corporate context, especially in (Grossman, 2013; Iversity, 2015; Radford et.al., 2015; Sreeleakha & Manikandan, 2015):

• Recruitment processes
• Training employees on compliance areas (such as health and safety at work or fire prevention for example)
• Training employees on specific fields counting with high flexibility, scalability and openness
• Human resource development in general
• Marketing and brand awareness by collaborating with high ranked universities increasing this way the visibility and reputation of the organisations involved

Larger companies already created their own MOOCs, but almost entirely in cooperation with educational providers. Examples include Udacity teaming up with Google, Deutsche Telekom with Cadena, or SAP teaming up with the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI). Also the major MOOC platforms established special programmes. Coursera already caters to 500+ companies with a special business programme, or EdX is working with 40 companies. In addition, some companies use external MOOCs to complement their HR offers.

Summing up, in the current knowledge-based economy characterized by industrial change, globalization, increased intensive competition, knowledge sharing and transfer, and ICT revolution, learning is one of the most indispensable activities (Zhang, 2003). Education and training worldwide is offering huge opportunities for business that might be further exploited by organisations. MOOCs are starting to take a role in this development and are increasingly employed in the world of business.

The business community experiences the economic and labour dynamics at a faster rhythm than higher education. For transferring the rapid responses to the educational offer, university-industry collaboration is recommended as it facilitates updated learning and knowledge acquisition offer (Patru & Balaji, 2016). At this point, the business community is playing a crucial role in aligning the skills of learners (being students, employees or unemployed people) to the labour market needs.

In summary, MOOC have the potential to:

• Become a way of training employees on very specific and concrete topics. This type of very focused course could utilise automated assessment;
• Educate new employees on the basics of their new role and on key aspects of the company;
• Complement employee existing experience with underlying theory and knowledge;
• Support personal educational interests, which the company cannot provide for;
• Promote interaction through online forums etc.;
• Promote corporative involvement in offering/producing MOOCs;
• Contribute to the continued modernisation of higher education;
• Adapt higher education course material and training to the workplace at low cost;
• Facilitate rapid and efficient lifelong learning.