Big data is revolutionizing all fields, and smart organizations are taking note. According to a 2011 report by global management firm McKinsey: "The use of big data will become a key basis of competition and growth for individual firms. From the standpoint of competitiveness and the potential capture of value, all companies need to take big data seriously." Now, in 2013, massive open online courses (MOOCs) are bringing big data to education. With courses enrolling upwards of 100,000 students each, an enormous amount of data is being generated and preliminary reports are starting to come in. The current available data come from three reports on three MOOC ventures: Duke’s Bioelectricity (Coursera), a group of six MOOCs offered by the University of Edinburgh (Coursera), and MIT’s Circuits and Electronics (edX). Here is a brief look at what the data show so far and what corporate trainers can learn from them. Who Takes MOOCs? MOOC students are older than traditional university students: Duke and Edinburgh reported that, respectively, 86 and 72 percent of students were age 44 and under, with one-third of Edinburgh students falling into the 25-to-34 year-old range. These data show that MOOC participants are more representative of the workforce than of the university population, a trend that should be encouraging for corporate trainers because it suggests both that employees are voluntarily engaging in challenging educational pursuits and that the MOOC format appeals to these independent learners. Why Take a MOOC? One of the biggest questions has centered on why MOOCs are so popular. Why would so many people sign up for these courses, which for the most part do not provide any formal recognition? Well, according to the data, most people take MOOCs just for fun. Eighty-seven percent of students enrolled in Duke’s Bioelectricity course because they were interested in the topic and 95 percent of students took one of Edinburgh’s six courses to learn new things. Professional development was also a significant factor, cited by 32 to 44 percent of students across the courses. More than 55 percent of students in MIT’s course enrolled to increase their knowledge and skills in general. These numbers are very encouraging for organizations and trainers - employees want to learn new things and to improve their careers, and they are taking proactive steps to do so. How Do People Learn in MOOCs? This is an interesting question. MOOCs are having a major impact in the education sector and one of the main reasons is that they are challenging traditional models of classroom delivery. So, what do the data tell us about how people learn when that learning is self-directed? Most people in the Edinburgh courses spent between 2 and 5 hours per week on their MOOC, and both Edinburgh and MIT reported that videos were the most popular resources. This is not surprising as video lectures represent the main method of content delivery for most MOOCs. The more interesting results involve participation in discussion forums. Although discussion forum participation was not huge compared to the overall course enrollment, MIT found that 52 percent of students who earned a certificate in the course were active forum participants and that 90 percent of forum activity comprised reading discussion threads without posting to them. In addition, the forums were the most popular resource for students completing homework problems. These findings are particularly significant because, as the authors of the report note, forum participation was not required and was not part of the main course activities. For corporate training, these results show that employees can do some L&D activities independently (i.e., watching videos), but that they also need opportunities to interact with one another. This is where the MOOC format has a major advantage over traditional e-learning. Whereas traditional e-learning often involves employees sitting in an isolated space interacting only with the computer, MOOCs capitalize on the power of social learning through discussion forums, blogs, wikis, virtual conferences, shared workspaces, and more. What Determines MOOC Success? There has been a lot of hype over low MOOC completion rates, and much of this hype is overstated. A large percentage of people sign up for MOOCs without ever intending to complete them - they just want to see what the courses are like. So it doesn’t make sense to criticize MOOCs for losing students they never really "had" in the first place. Both Duke and MIT analyzed factors that contribute to MOOC completion and success. Here is what they found. Duke reports that four factors contribute to MOOC completion: formal recognition of accomplishment, professional development, participation in forums/interaction with other students, and MOOCs taken as supplements to credit-bearing courses. Going beyond simple completion, the MIT researchers investigated the factors that determine MOOC success. They found the strongest predictor of achievement was whether or not the students worked offline with someone else on the material. Collaborating with other students or subject matter experts translated into a three-point increase in score over working independently. For corporate training programs, the implications of these results are clear: learners are most likely to complete MOOCs when they are taking the courses for a purpose and their achievements are recognized, and interaction with fellow learners is essential for both motivation and learning. Duke also identified three factors that prevented students from completing their courses: lack of time, insufficient background skills, and trouble moving from concepts to applications. In implementing MOOCs as part of corporate training programs, organizations must consider these factors and ensure that their employees are receiving adequate instructional support. How Do Learners Rate MOOCs? Finally, a major boon for MOOCs is that students really, really like them. Duke reported high ratings for both student attitudes and student-reported learning outcomes, and 98% of Edinburgh respondents reported that "they felt they got out of the course what they wanted." As L&D budgets are slashed and organizations consider their training needs, many companies will start turning to MOOCs to deliver their training programs. As with any educational program, the keys to success in training MOOCs are engaging employees and facilitating their learning as effectively as possible. MOOCs are still very new and the data are just coming in, but they can provide valuable information about how people learn and interact online. Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:MOOC Analytics: What Corporate Training Can Learn from Big…MOOCs: Personal Initiative and Professional DevelopmentBeyond Cost-Savings: Advantages of MOOCs for Corporate…How to MOOC: Designing Effective MOOC Training ProgramsMOOCs: From the Classroom to the Conference Room(Visited 53 times, 2 visits today)

Most discussions of massive open online courses (MOOCs) focus primarily on the massive component. These courses are huge in every sense of the word—they have massive enrollments, they generate massive amounts of data, and they have certainly caused massive controversy. It’s true that the technology that underlies MOOCs allows for all aspects of instruction to occur on a much larger scale than was ever possible before, but focusing solely on this element masks what is arguably MOOCs’ most valuable contribution to education: flexibility. MOOCs allow education to occur in highly flexible and adaptable environments, and one consequence of this is that learning is not only getting much bigger, but in some important ways it is also getting significantly smaller. Access to anywhere, anytime learning has liberated instructors and students from the four-hour seminar and the three-day workshop: they can now make the most of even five spare minutes, which has led to a new interest in microlearning. Microlearning is learning that takes place on a very small scale. Currently, the term microlearning is used to describe a couple of different instructional formats. The first conceptualization of microlearning is as learning split up into short modules, with course content and complete learning activities encapsulated in five- to ten-minute packages. This is the instructional approach generally taken in MOOCs (short video lectures, embedded short quizzes, etc.), and I’ve written about this practice before using the moniker "bite-sized learning." Bite-sized learning is ideally tailored for how our brains learn, it can be accessed any time via computers or mobile devices, and it can go a long way toward ensuring that training is focused on real skill mastery rather than superficial seat time. Although it still involves delivering content and performing learning activities in small chunks, the second form of microlearning is a different creature entirely. Here, microlearning describes a type of learning in which mini learning activities of all types are used to achieve various learning goals, including onboarding, content reinforcement, and even assessment. Microlearning units can be delivered as part of larger MOOC modules and courses, but they can also be individually packaged to meet the needs of individual learners and learning groups. Microlearning can be used as part of "push" applications, in which the instructor determines what learning units to deliver when and where, or as "pull" applications, in which the learner decides when and how to access the learning resources. Microlearning units can take many forms, and coupled with mobile technologies, this style can be used to expand the boundaries of the corporate classroom. Introductions, summaries, short quizzes, blogs, polls and surveys—any type of content can be used in microlearning. On the "push" side, a short introductory activity can prepare students for a longer seminar or a summary can be delivered as reinforcement following a formal learning session. Mini activities can be pushed to users via RSS feeds, SMS instant messaging, and so on. On the "pull" side, packaging resources into small machine-readable chunks organized into a searchable database can allow learners to access course materials à la carte outside of a formal course. This leads to increased engagement and user-determined just-in-time learning. How does microlearning relate to MOOCs? Conceptually, MOOCs have raised the bar for what learners expect of their educational experiences—the idea of the traditional classroom in which an instructor lectures for an hour and students take notes (or sleep) has been all but obliterated. Today learners expect to be much more engaged, for example, in flipped classrooms and through using various technologies. Learners also expect to be able to access and participate in their courses anytime and from anywhere. In practice, the technologies that support MOOCs, such as new software-as-a-service learning management systems, can also support microlearning. Many of the tools already in place, like email announcements, course dashboards, and integrated social media platforms, can be used to deliver and access microlearning units. Tobes Kelly recently wrote on the eLearning Mind blog that "microlearning…has long been a concept in search of the right technology." Well that technology is now available, and as Kelly suggests, "access to microlearning modules is the next natural step in workforce training." What if we could put these two recent learning trends together into a "microlearning MOOC"? What would it look like? Think massive, but also mini. Onboarding activities done before class; summaries sent an hour, a week, or a month later; videos and learning units accessible via a searchable database; virtual flashcards, discussion prompts, and quizzes sent throughout the training session; short interactive activities that happen outside the formal course—the possibilities are many, and the result would be to move training even farther out of the classroom and help learners incorporate and apply it in their jobs and in their lives. A microlearning MOOC would further challenge popular conceptions about when and where learning occurs, because the answer would be all of the time and everywhere. MOOCs are changing how we learn and what we expect of education. They have decoupled learning from the classroom, which has opened up a range of new possible learning environments. L&D departments can leverage this new phenomenon to not only create more meaningful trainings, but also to ensure that training is put into practice, rather than quickly forgotten, which is all too often the case. Microlearning is a powerful idea whose time has come. Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:How to MOOC: Bite-Sized ContentHow MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILTHow to MOOC: Technology-Enabled Learning Tools, Part 1New MOOC Models: Blended LearningHow to MOOC: Designing Effective MOOC Training Programs(Visited 34 times, 1 visits today)

It seems like at least once a week there is a major news headline declaring that our educational system is broken, and looking at the data on how U.S. students compare with students in other countries, it is hard to doubt that this conclusion is true. The training system is broken as well. Results from an ASTD study suggest that as much as 90 percent of new skills learned during training are lost within one year, which means that despite large expenditures on training programs, many companies are not realizing significant returns on their investment (ROIs). What’s worse, many companies do not systematically analyze these ROIs, so they really have no idea what they are getting for their training dollars. Part of the problem is that the traditional models of education and training aren’t brain-friendly, meaning that they are completely removed from how people actually learn. For many years (and even centuries), the commonly held belief was that exposure to information equaled learning. But this simply isn’t true: spending an hour listening to a classroom lecture or attending a four-hour seminar with no follow-up does not translate into meaningful learning, yet this remains the dominant model in many organizations. There is some good news to be had in all of this: broken systems open the door for innovation, and that is exactly what is happening right now in education and training. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have swooped onto the scene, threatening commonly held beliefs and business models left, right, and center. I’ve said before that the main influence of MOOCs is pedagogical—they are changing the focus from knowledge to outcomes, from what students know to what they will be able to do. Using MOOC tools, instructors can design courses that do translate into meaningful learning because they are more closely aligned with how people actually learn. Here are some ways MOOCs promote brain-friendly training programs: No more long boring lectures Let’s be honest: lectures don’t work. The reason they don’t work is because people don’t pay attention to them. Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur measured students’ brain activation during various daily activities and found that their brains are about as engaged during a lecture as when watching television, and considerably less than when sleeping. Other research has found that during a standard 50-minute lecture, students start to lose interest after about 30 seconds and then cycle between attention and inattention in short and ever-decreasing increments. Given Mazur’s research, this finding is hardly surprising—how can people pay attention to something when they are less alert than during asleep? The MOOC model solves this problem by eliminating the long lecture altogether. Although videos provide the main method of formal content delivery, this delivery is kept to a minimum. In early MOOCs, videos ran for around 10 to 15 minutes, but now the average is closer to 5 to 7 minutes, with other activities in between. Many videos also contain embedded activities, such as recall questions and topics for reflection, which engage the brain so that it doesn’t shut down. A lot more active learning Our brains are not built to memorize; they are built to do. Active learning focuses on the application of knowledge, rather than just its acquisition. This is especially important for training programs, in which the goal is to improve job performance and boost the company’s bottom line. Knowledge by itself does not mean much if you can’t do anything with it, and learning to apply knowledge can help people deal more effectively with new kinds of problems. A recent Harvard Magazine article explored the "twilight of the lecture," and in it, Terry Aladjem, the Executive Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, explains the importance of active learning: "Active learning is really at a premium. It’s the most effective thing…That means focusing on what students actually do in the classroom, or in some other learning environment. From cognitive science, we hear that learning is a process of moving information from short-term to long-term memory; assessment research has proven that active learning does that best." MOOCs use several active learning strategies, including real-world problem-solving and interactive simulations, course discussions on social media platforms, assessments that require students to curate and share content, and peer-reviewed assignments and exams. As interactive Internet technology improves, the options available for active online learning will only expand. Games to make training fun The words training and fun don’t often appear in the same sentence (and usually with good reason), but that doesn’t mean these two things are mutually exclusive by nature. I’ve talked before about using gamification to increase employee engagement, especially with the new generation entering the workforce, and games are increasingly being used in education because they are very brain-friendly and highly effective motivators. Games activate multiple brain pathways associated with good feelings. Success in a game can trigger the brain to release endorphins, neurotransmitters that act as the body’s "natural morphine" and are associated with feelings of euphoria and exhilaration. Games also stimulate the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward. According to neuroscientist Paul Howard-Jones in a New York Times article, computer games can trigger the brain to produce dopamine, "which helps orient our attention and enhances the making of connections between neurons, which is the physical basis for learning." There are many ways to gamify a MOOC: employees can earn points by watching videos and contributing to class discussions, badges can be created to represent various achievements, competitions can be held, serious games can be incorporated, and so on. See this article for more ideas. The world, and especially the business landscape, is changing so quickly now that training programs that employees sleep through and then forget no longer cut it. To compete, organizations need training that produces real, measureable ROIs. MOOCs combined with gamified applications can motivate and engage employees as well as provide meaningful learning experiences that will help them tackle real-world problems confidently and effectively. Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:How to MOOC: Bite-Sized ContentHow to MOOC: Meaningful Assessment Through Real-World…How to MOOC: Technology-Enabled Learning Tools, Part 1MOOCs: Flipping the Corporate ClassroomMOOCs and Microlearning(Visited 35 times, 1 visits today)

Source: BestCollegesOnline.org What’s at stake?: $400 billion: amount of money spent annually in U.S. on universities  The $400 billion represents: more than the annual revenues of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter combined. Every educational institution wants a piece of that pie. MOOCs could jeopardize that. The World Wide U 10 million: estimated number of students who have taken at least one MOOC When it all began:  The promise of online education: • low costs • extreme accessibility by anyone • customized pacing • flexibility in scheduling • more digitally based interactive tools 1985: Dave Cormier "coins" the term MOOC, for Massive Open Online Courses. 1993: Jones International University becomes first online U. [in the world] 1999: JIU became first fully online university in the U.S. to be accredited. But it’s not free: tuition is $12,720 2013 enrollment (full and part time, undergrad and graduate): about 4,500 2012: Coursera founded by two Stanford professors 5.7 million: most recent enrollment, Coursera 83: number of universities and colleges around the world forming partnership with Coursera $65 million: amount of venture capital raised to fund Coursera Udacity (2012) 56,000: number of students who signed up for courses in Udacity two weeks after 2011 launch 1.6 million students, to date Edx: 20: number of schools partnered in Edx, an online non-profit provider started by Harvard and MIT founded in 2013 FutureLearn: 21: number of British universities partnered to start FutureLearn (2013) Who are MOOC students?  .3 % primary school 2.8 % some secondary 9.7% completed high school 3.8% some additional training (apprentices) 43.4 undergraduate university 40.2 postgraduates How global are MOOCs now (top 10 countries of origin):  U.S.: 28% U.K. 11% India: 4.6% Brazil: 4.5% Canada: 4% Spain: 3.9% Australia: 3.5% Greece: 2.2 % Russia: 1.9% Germany: 1.8% Top 10 MOOCs (free courses)  • Udemy: Courses taught by teachers at Northwestern and Dartmouth (among others) • ITunesU - Apple’s free app "gives students access to all the materials for courses in a single place. Right in the app, they can play video or audio lectures. Read books and view presentations." • Stanford • Most popular free course: Introduction to AI. 160,000 students from 190 countries.. • UC Berkeley -Check out: Berkeley Webcasts and Berkeley RSS Feeds. • MIT Free Courses - Check out MIT’s RSS MOOC feed. Also MIT’s Open Courseware. • Duke Free Courses - Duke offers courses on ITunesU. • Harvard Free Courses -Get a free Harvard education. No application is required. • UCLA Free Courses - • Yale Free Courses -The school offers "free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University." • Carnegie Mellon Free Courses - Carnegie Mellon boasts "No instructors, no credits, no charge." Pros and Cons of MOOCs Pro • Free. • Provide a solution to overcrowding. • Force professors to improve lectures. • Create a dynamic archive. • Are designed to ensure that students keep up. MOOCS are real college courses, complete with tests and grades. • Bring people together from all over the world. • Allow teachers to make the most of classroom time in blended classes. • Offer interesting business opportunities. MOOC companies launched in 2012: edX by Harvard and MIT; Coursea, a Stanford company; and Udacity, which focuses on science and tech. Cons • Low graduation rate: estimated at about 10% • Easier for students to drop out • Do not offer much support for struggling students? • Interactivity, a challenge. [When you have…150,000 students] • Grading papers is impossible. • Overcrowding • Miss the magic of human interaction (in small groups) • Will shrink faculties, eventually eliminating them. And now…. something new in 2013 (an alternative to MOOCs):  SPOCs: Small Private Online Courses • New B-to-B concept: create an online course and license it to a university or an organization or corporation. • Colorado State Global Campus, first to offer SPOCs as an experiment • SPOCs have 17-25 students Sources: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/hack-higher-education/top-ed-tech-trends-2012-moocs http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/MOOC_Final.pdf http://www.cdlponline.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=whatis&pg=3 http://www.economist.com/news/business/21582001-army-new-online-courses-scaring-wits-out-traditional-universities-can-they http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98 http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/11/19/online-educations-depressing-statistics-and-what-t.aspx http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb?partner=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company%29&curator=MediaREDEF http://collegeprowler.com/jones-international-university/statistics/ http://www.bdpa-detroit.org/portal/index.php/comittees/high-school-computer-competition-hscc/29-education/57-moocs-top-10-sites-for-free-education-with-elite-universities.html http://adulted.about.com/od/Adult-Education-in-the-U.S./a/The-Pros-And-Cons-Of-Moocs.htm http://www.uk.idp.com/for_clients/aiec_2013_live/session_synopses_and_videos/moocs.aspx http://moocnewsandreviews.com/what-do-we-know-about-mooc-students-so-far/ http://www.universitybusiness.com/article/spocs-may-provide-what-moocs-can%E2%80%99t http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-18/education-startup-coursera-raises-16-million-from-kleiner-nea.html Related Posts:MOOCs: From the Classroom to the Conference RoomMOOCs: Personal Initiative and Professional DevelopmentWharton Puts First-Year MBA programs online for FreeMOOC: The King is Dead - Long Live the KingMOOCs: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, and Where We’re…(Visited 22 times, 1 visits today)

Corporate culture has become a new buzzword, fueled partly by the increased importance being placed on soft skills. For a long time, corporate culture was generally ignored, or at least not actively shaped and promoted. But today an organization’s culture has a huge impact on its ability to attract and retain top talent as well as employee job satisfaction, productivity, and performance—all of which directly impact the bottom line. An excellent culture, which includes the organization’s values and desired employee behaviors, has been instrumental to the success of companies like Apple, and many businesses are now making hiring and firing decisions based on an applicant’s or employee’s cultural "goodness of fit." Every organization has a culture and that culture matters. Lendio CEO Brock Blake wrote in a recent blog post at Forbes.com that corporate culture is the most important factor in "attracting (and keeping) rockstar talent." Integrating corporate culture into a training program can improve communication, unify the culture across all levels of a company, and encourage and reinforce employee behaviors that are aligned with the organizational goals and expectations. But many organizations do not adequately invest in corporate culture training, which can be a costly, and even fatal, mistake. Corporate culture starts at the top, with the articulated vision and mission of the company and the behaviors of executives, and it is these senior stakeholders who need to take the reins in promoting excellence. As Blake wrote: "It really doesn’t matter if your business is large or small—been around for a while or a startup, it starts with you. If your company has a crappy culture, it’s your fault." Massive open online courses (MOOCs) offer a unique and powerful way to implement corporate culture training. Using this scalable, flexible format, executives can communicate the company’s vision and mission, employees can learn and practice desired behaviors, and activities can be designed to promote teamwork within and across project groups, departments, and even geographical locations. Here are some ways MOOCs can help you implement or improve the corporate culture in your organization: Communicating consistent information. The key to a great corporate culture is consistency. Too often, senior executives think they are creating a specific type of culture (e.g., one where creativity and innovation are encouraged), but this message is not making its way down the ladder (e.g., employees feel too harshly punished for mistakes). To make sure the message is consistent from top to bottom, the core values must be clearly articulated by senior stakeholders and understood by everyone in the company. One major advantage of delivering training via a MOOC is that it is a highly efficient way to communicate the corporation’s core values and stories quickly and to the entire organization all at once. Training leaders to embody the desired culture. All leaders in an organization need to know what the desired culture is and what practices and behaviors will reflect that culture. Mini-MOOCs are ideal for discussion-oriented management courses, such as ethical awareness and decision-making. Using various technology-enabled learning tools, leaders can focus on responding to actual problems and scenarios, and practice the desired behaviors via role play, interactive simulations, and synchronous or asynchronous discussions in virtual spaces. Building cultural learning networks. MOOCs are not just new ways to deliver content; they are tools for people to build their own personal learning networks, which represent intersections between content, people, and other resources. Culture is different from other training subjects because it is primarily learned through observing and interacting with others. MOOCs provide many opportunities for employees to identify, observe, and interact with their peers, thus building their own cultural learning networks. As these networks evolve, natural leaders will emerge, and the social learning tools used in MOOCs can help organizations identify these leaders and ensure that they are communicating and practicing the desired culture. Observing the created culture. Since MOOCs make nearly every aspect of the learning experience trackable, they provide myriad opportunities to observe the current culture in different departments or the organization as a whole. This can help executives better understand the culture that they create. Also, by monitoring the various activities within a MOOC, trainers can observe employees’ interactions and provide feedback and support when needed to ensure that the actual culture aligns with the desired one. Identifying employees who embody the desired culture. Another advantage of putting the entire training experience online is the ability to identify and reward employees who embody the desired culture, as well as determine when reinforcement is needed. Offering advancement opportunities to employees who personify an organization’s desired culture is an excellent way to motivate others to follow their lead. Only recently has the cultural fit between employees and organizations been recognized and studied, but by some reports nearly 9 in 10 new hire failures are due to a poor cultural fit and many companies now consider applicants’ cultural fit more important than their actual skills. Not every aspect of cultural fit can be trained, but many can, and organizations need to lead the way by ensuring that their core values and desired culture and behaviors are clearly understood and practiced by every employee. The MOOC format is an engaging, effective way to provide the needed corporate culture training at all levels. Don’t let a crappy culture get in the way of your organization’s success. Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Creating a Culture of LeadershipTraining Mojo: 10 Steps to Create Your Training DojoKey Factors in MOOC Success, Part 2Training Mojo: Developing a Culture of Training by Getting…Simulation Components(Visited 51 times, 1 visits today)

How much of their essential job skills and knowledge are people in your organization learning from one another? 10%? 20%? Probably closer to 80%. Do you know what they are learning? Does it align with the goals of your training program? Well, that may be difficult to judge, but one thing is certain: they will remember it. Regardless of how much time and energy you put into creating content and designing your training, your employees will learn more from their peers. In a previous set of articles, we looked at the advantages of using a massive open online course (MOOC) to incorporate informal learning into training programs. Here we will focus more specifically on peer learning and how a MOOC can be used to facilitate, structure, and assess it. Peer learning is a powerful learning tool, but one that is largely unharnessed in any organized way, often because of the belief that it does not allow for very tight control. One method that many companies have embraced is mentorship, and research has shown that employees who have mentors feel more supported by the organization, show stronger organizational commitment, and are more likely to stay. But peer learning takes place in many other ways—people give one another advice, opinions, and ad hoc lessons all of the time, over email, the phone, and even the water cooler. Although these interactions are casual, they nevertheless account for a large amount of organizational learning, and companies can benefit from not only encouraging but also facilitating them. There are many reasons for organizations to adopt peer learning: People remember more of what they learn from one another than from listening to a lecture or reading a document. Peer learning is by far the least expensive training option. Peer learning is often more focused on "just-in-time" than "just-in-case" learning and leads to more immediate performance results. People often prefer learning from their peers. Peer learning allows organizations to draw on a larger knowledge base and can lead to new, innovative approaches to problem-solving. The main challenge for organizations has been that much of peer learning takes place in an unstructured environment so that it is impossible to assess exactly what learning is taking place. However, as more training moves online and starts to incorporate social media, better tools are becoming available to facilitate, track, and perform quality control on peer learning. One of the best ways to integrate peer learning directly into the formal training experience is through a MOOC. In their short life, MOOCs have already evolved quite a lot. The first MOOCs were based on a connectivist framework, where the building of personal knowledge networks was considered more important than the content learned. Then, with the birth of Coursera, MOOCs started to more closely resemble traditional classroom experiences, with lectures comprising the main learning activity. Now, the pendulum is swinging back toward more collaboration, and preliminary results from new collaborative MOOC provider NovoEd suggest that students are more likely to stick with courses that emphasize social interaction. We have previously explored the technology-enabled learning tools that facilitate social interaction in MOOCs. Here are some structured and assessable ways to use these tools to ensure that peer learning is in line with your organizational objectives. Social media and the MOOC dashboard. The MOOC dashboard is like the course homepage—it contains course navigation buttons, the course calendar, and links to the course pages and activities. Many MOOCs also aggregate student blog posts and course Twitter feeds directly onto the dashboard so that students can easily access their peers’ contributions. This is a way for instructors to see what issues learners are talking about and to highlight the best or most relevant student posts. Discussion board voting. Many MOOC discussion boards now incorporate a feature that allows users not only to post comments, but also to vote up the comments that are the most helpful or most relevant. "Voting up" moves the comment closer to the top of the discussion thread, which allows instructors to identify and respond to popular questions, clear up any confusion, and contribute to discussions on important issues. It also allows instructors to identify what peer information is garnering the most attention as well as which employees are providing the highest-quality information. In addition, instructors can correct any erroneous information before it is propagated too widely. Content sharing and social bookmarking. People look for answers to work-related questions online all of the time and your organization will benefit from employees sharing this information. Encourage employees to find, curate, or create their own resources and share them via content sharing and social bookmarking sites. Collaborative problem-solving. A series of studies by Kyle Emich and Evan Polman demonstrated that people are more creative and provide better solutions when they work on solving other people’s problems than on their own. Use this to your advantage by assigning group problem-solving projects to be completed in virtual spaces. Combine this approach with discussion board voting by having employees post their problems, offer solutions, and then vote on the best solutions. Peer-led modules or courses. Peer learning allows companies to build extensive organizational knowledge bases and take full advantage of their human capital. One way to maximize this potential is to allow exceptional employees to deliver their own mini-MOOCs. For example, if your organization has an excellent salesperson or a highly effective motivator, consider having that person design and deliver his or her own MOOC to other employees. Gamification. Peer learning is an excellent way to add gamification elements to a MOOC. Learners can earn points for contributing to conversations, asking and answering questions, and having their discussion board posts voted up. Badges can be used as a way to recognize and reward effective peer teachers. The possibilities are enormous. The main advantage of incorporating peer learning directly into a MOOC is that this learning can be tracked. Using analytics tools, you can see who is teaching, who is learning, and what they are learning. You can identify which people are most influential for different types of content and the methods employees use most to ask and answer questions. In this way, MOOCs bring even water cooler conversations under tighter control. You also might be surprised at the response. After a recent MOOC that encouraged students to use a variety of social media tools, the instructors noted in a report that "the fire that took off burned by a fuel lying latent amongst a huge number of participants, who pounced, as though having been waiting for some time for such an opportunity. " Wouldn’t it be nice to see that kind of passion about a training program? Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 1How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 1Key Factors in MOOC Success, Part 2How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 2How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 2(Visited 61 times, 2 visits today)

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have rocked the world of education probably faster than any other innovation in history. In just over a year, MOOCs have gone from being viewed as a panacea for all that ails education to being seen as an imposter: a cheapened form of education. Now the pendulum is swinging back to somewhere in the middle. Several pundits and observers have noted that MOOCs are following the Gartner hype cycle for emerging technologies, and most agree that we are now somewhere between the "trough of disillusionment" and the "slope of enlightenment," on our way to the "plateau of productivity." As we move toward an environment where MOOCs are considered neither cure-alls nor curses, but rather tools that can be used in many different ways to improve education, it is useful to take a few steps back and examine where we’ve been and where we are so that we can make some reasonable predictions about where we’re going. Cathy Sandeen of the American Council on Education colorfully described MOOCs in a recent Huffington Post article as having "splashed on the higher education scene in sensational fashion" when Coursera and Udacity launched in early 2012. But, as she notes, the history of MOOCs goes back to 2008, when George Siemens and Stephen Downes offered "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" online for students at the University of Manitoba as well as for anyone else who was interested. The paying students at the university received credit for the course, and about 2000 additional students participated for free but not for credit. The theory behind this initial MOOC viewed knowledge as distributed and education as a process of building personal learning networks. Consequently, the course was based on open educational resources and peer learning. It wasn’t until the big names, like Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, came on the scene that the hype cycle really started to accelerate. In the spring of 2012, both Coursera and Udacity opened their virtual doors, with edX following a few months later. The courses offered through these platforms were fundamentally different from the 2008 MOOC experiment, more closely mirroring the traditional classroom experience, with lectures, discussions, and tests that consisted mostly of multiple-choice questions. Because of the elite universities associated with the courses, students started to sign up by the thousands, then by the tens of thousands, and then by the millions. The huge response to these courses ignited a fire under the entire education community - many people praised MOOCs for their ability to offer unprecedented access to education at a low cost, while many others criticized them for unsound pedagogy and lack of student accountability. But students continued to sign up and universities continued to jump on the bandwagon. MOOCs gained credibility when the American Council on Education recommended some for credit, and the California and Texas higher education systems started to look for ways to use MOOCs, especially for over-enrolled and remedial classes. By that time, it had become apparent that MOOCs were a force that could not be ignored and that they could be powerful tools for solving many problems facing education, including the exponentially rising cost. Inevitably, there came some bad news, and MOOCs crested the "peak of inflated expectations," starting a headlong dive into the "trough of disillusionment." The bad news came from a couple of different fronts. First, although top universities were offering MOOCs, none were accepting them for credit. Also, the dropout rates were very high, with less than 10 percent of enrolled students actually completing their courses. In addition, many educators attacked the pedagogy of MOOCs, particularly those with no interactive component. To top it all off, San Jose State University recently put a partnership with Udacity on "pause" after initial results showed that students in the MOOC section of a class performed worse than students in the traditional section. Predictably, there have been a few "I told you so’s," and educators across the country are breathing sighs of relief that their jobs are not in imminent danger. But now, MOOCs are moving along the "slope of enlightenment" as we examine what works and what doesn’t in the current MOOC format and use these discoveries to improve education. For example, instructors in many settings are using the flipped classroom model and incorporating MOOC elements into blended learning programs. So what does the future look like for MOOCs? Due to their popularity as well as the massive resources that have been invested in them, it is safe to say that MOOCs are here to stay, at least for now. So the question becomes how we will use them. Joshua Kim of Dartmouth College suggested in a recent edSurge article that MOOCs will promote investment and innovation in education because they "focus attention on teaching." MOOCs have changed how we look at teaching and learning - they have shifted the focus of education away from the transfer of knowledge and toward what students can do with that knowledge. This change is in line what has been framed as a shift from a knowledge economy to a creative economy. With information at our fingertips 24/7, the new focus is on critical thinking, problem-solving, judgment, and decision-making - which incidentally are also the workplace skills that are currently in the highest demand. MOOCs and their elements are also starting to be incorporated into different areas of education, like corporate training, workplace skills training, and continuing and professional development. The goals of training programs are different than those for higher education - organizations’ main focus is performance outcomes that result directly from employee training. For these programs, MOOCs have the potential to deliver the necessary training effectively and at huge cost savings. In fact, some writers have suggested that the early MOOCs were barking up the wrong tree - the ideal target audience for these courses is not Stanford students or leisure learners; it is workers who need to acquire new skills and competencies to upgrade their skills and perform better in their jobs. Several MOOCs are already aimed at this audience, such as Coursera’s continuing education programs for teachers and Aquent’s recently opened Gymnasium, which offers coding courses for creative professionals. As MOOCs move toward the "plateau of productivity," the focus will shift from whether or not they should be used to finding the best ways to use them. New tools and technologies will become available, new audiences will be engaged, and new innovations will improve the learning experience for everyone involved. Only then will MOOCs live up to their promise of disrupting and transforming education. Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:MOOCs: Personal Initiative and Professional DevelopmentMOOCs: From the Classroom to the Conference RoomMOOC: The King is Dead - Long Live the KingHow MOOCs Are Used in Workplace TrainingWhy MOOCs? Why Now?(Visited 202 times, 1 visits today)

For almost two years now, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been remaking the educational and training landscape. Whether you love MOOCs or hate them, it is impossible to deny that they have changed (and are still changing) how we think about education. One of the biggest impacts MOOCs have had is not in the massive online arena at all; it is in more traditional forms of education, namely, instructor-led training (ILT). The game has changed and ILT, whether delivered face-to-face or online, is fundamentally different today from what it was before MOOCs came on the scene. This is particularly true for corporate training and personal and professional development, as these fields have been quick to adopt the new technologies and strategies. Here are some ways MOOCs are improving ILT for all forms of delivery: Higher Expectations Let’s face it: training and development hasn’t exactly been the star of the corporate show. Despite spending billions of dollars on training programs, many companies have not been realizing significant ROIs, mainly because within a year employees forget 90 percent of what they learn. Why do people forget? Well, as Eric Skilling wrote for the Elearning Industry blog, "It’s the training!" Employees forget because "they simply weren’t that engaged to begin with. If we trace that back to the source it always leads to the online training." But MOOCs are changing all of that and today the expectations of T&D are higher, for both employees and organizations. Now, with interactive content and social and mobile technologies (discussed below), employees walk into training sessions expecting to be engaged—they want to participate in their own education (this is why more than 10 million people have taken MOOCs) and they thrive when they have the tools to do so. On the other side, companies are expecting to realize a return on their T&D investments, and they are using both better training methods and better analytics to ensure that they do. Better Content MOOCs and a plethora of new technology-enabled learning tools have improved training content in all environments. The videos, screencasts, simulations, and other deliver methods that have becoming popular with MOOCs can also be used in face-to-face (F2F) training and non-massive digital learning environments. MOOCs have also shifted the focus from "teaching" to "learning"; for example, it is now widely acknowledged that splitting content into bite-sized chunks leads to much better learning than can be achieved through long lectures and endless PowerPoint presentations. Finally, many organizations are starting to break away from the idea that all training content must be developed in-house. Today many standard types of trainings (from Office skills to sexual harassment training) are available in MOOC-like formats and through elearning marketplaces. These trainings can be enhanced with proprietary content if necessary, but they no longer need to be developed from scratch. Even courses that will be built from the ground up can be based on YouTube videos and other available resources, making courses more interactive as well as saving organizations both time and money. Better Learning Formats Although online training is nothing new, MOOCs have broadened our ideas about what it can look like. Training professionals no longer need to pick just one format for delivery—they can match the format to the content in the way that best facilitates learning. Today, with the many training formats available, it is rare to have a course that is not blended in some fashion. For example, a single course can combine synchronous and asynchronous learning, F2F meetings and virtual interactions, instructor-assigned content and learner-contributed materials. One major advantage of using digital tools even for traditional ILT is that online conversations and other user-contributed resources can easily be translated into an organizational knowledge base. In this way, training sessions can also provide performance support. Social and Mobile Learning Social and mobile learning have been two of the major hallmarks of MOOCs, but they have found homes in more traditional classrooms as well. Although learners in online courses have been interacting on discussion boards for a long time, MOOCs have enhanced engagement by moving the conversations onto new platforms. Using Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools for training is a way to bring training to employees rather than trying to drag employees into the training. Social learning tools also assist employees in developing personal learning networks, both within and outside of the company. Mobile technologies provide ways for learners even in F2F environments to interact with the content and with one another outside of the classroom. This not only provides performance support, but also helps foster a "learning mindset"—because learning resources and personal learning networks can be accessed anytime, from anywhere, learning is becoming something we do every day, not just for four hours once a month. This increases engagement and retention in all types of courses, which can help organizations realize the ROIs they’ve been missing. Credentials and Informal Learning MOOCs have definitely changed the way we think about credentials and informal learning, with informal learning finally being given the credit it deserves. This evolution is ongoing, but MOOCs and other informal learning environments (like coding boot camps) are shifting the focus away from certificates and degrees and toward demonstrable knowledge and skills. In training environments, this shift is manifesting as a reduced emphasis on seat time (i.e., attending a half-day seminar) and a greater emphasis on application (i.e., solving real-world problems). This renewed focus on what employees are actually learning, rather than on how long they spend in the classroom, is helping organizations realize immediate benefits from their training investments. There is still a lot of debate surrounding the utility of MOOCs in general. But even organizations that decide not to go the massive route can greatly benefit from using MOOC tools and strategies in their traditional training programs. As the format continues to evolve, and the tools become even better, training—regardless of how it is delivered—will become more engaging and more effective, which will lead to a more positive impact on the bottom line. Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:MOOCs and Performance SupportMOOCs and MicrolearningNew MOOC Models: Blended LearningKey Factors in MOOC Success, Part 2How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 1(Visited 50 times, 1 visits today)

"MOOCs will destroy education!" "MOOCs are wonderful / terrible / game changing innovations / over-hyped gimmicks!" "MOOCs are the future!" "MOOCs are dead!" If you’ve been paying attention to the MOOC news over the past year or so, you’ve undoubtedly heard at least one (and probably all) of these proclamations. But even as experts continue to debate the place of MOOCs in our educational systems, there is one fact that is impossible to overlook: MOOCs are very, very popular. In October, Coursera reached "the triple milestone": the platform how hosts more than 100 institutions offering more than 500 courses to more than 5 million students. Why are these courses, which generally do not confer any official credit, so popular? And how should organizations view this trend? I have written extensively about the various advantages of MOOCs and what benefits they have for learners and organizations. All of these reasons can fit under three major umbrellas: Novelty. MOOCs are completely different from any model of education we have ever experienced before and they utilize many of today’s top consumer technologies. From the learners’ point of view, the idea of being able to access hundreds of courses from top universities on a cell phone is pretty amazing. From the instructors’ point of view, the ability to reach more students in one semester than is normally possible in an entire career is almost mind-boggling. Necessity. There is no question that our education systems are in bad shape, and that goes for training and professional development as well. Institutions and organizations are spending a lot of money on education, but in terms of job skills, they are seeing very little ROI. MOOCs offer a way to decrease costs and (when done well) also improve learning. On the other side of the coin, many workers see MOOCs as a free and flexible way to stay up-to-date in their fields and enhance their skills. The results of several surveys have revealed that about half of the people who enroll in MOOCs do so for work-related reasons, even though their efforts will not be formally recognized. Possibility. Many people see MOOCs as a harbinger of changes to come. MOOCs themselves may not replace traditional models of education, but they are certainly expanding our ideas about what is possible. It is probably no coincidence that the exponential gains in the popularity of MOOCs have coincided with increased interest in competency-based education, alternative credentials, and other non-traditional models of learning. In sum, MOOCs are popular because they are big and new, because both organizations and learners need better solutions, and because they signal larger changes in how we view education and training in general. Here are three reasons organizations can’t afford to just sit back and see what happens—they need to get in the game: The potential marketplace is huge. Josh Bersin wrote in a recent article on Forbes that "there are more than 2 billion potential learners around the world today, and more than 70 percent of these are unable to afford a college degree." With McKinsey expecting that by 2020 a college education will confer a 300 percent salary advantage, this means a lot of people will be looking for low-cost options for education. Bersin also noted that in addition to college students the potential MOOC audience includes "hundreds of millions of post-secondary students and professionals," who "as the MOOC certification market matures…will find online education more and more valuable every quarter." The biggest skills gap is yet to come. Companies in nearly all industries are currently having difficulty finding qualified workers for many positions, and this trend is expected to continue. A recent Accenture study found that nearly half of the businesses surveyed anticipate an even greater skills gap in the next one or two years, which will directly impact business performance. Organizations need to find efficient and cost-effective answers to this problem now, rather than waiting for the situation to get worse. Younger workers will expect it. According to the "Accenture 2013 College Graduate Employment Survey," more than three-quarters of students who graduated from college this year expected the employer to provide formal training, and many of them will expect that training to be online. A recent study found that Millennial students think that more learning will become virtual and take advantage of social media. An organization that does not offer cutting-edge training programs may have difficulty attracting the next generations of workers. MOOCs will influence future models of learning. I suggested above that MOOCs are harbingers of things to come. The education landscape is changing as quickly, and the models of instruction that are popular in ten years might not even be on the radar today. But MOOCs, the philosophies that guide them, and the tools that support them will inform future models of both in-person and online education and training. Getting involved now is the best way organizations can become part of the conversation. So, let’s return to the opening questions. Why MOOCs? Because they provide a promising novel solution (or at least a starting point) for some of the biggest problems facing our educational and training systems today. Why now? Because, for many organizations, "later" may very well be too late. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?MOOCs: Personal Initiative and Professional DevelopmentMOOCs: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, and Where We’re…MOOCs: From the Classroom to the Conference RoomMOOCs to Bridge the Workplace Skills Gap(Visited 31 times, 1 visits today)

MOOCs (at least the most popular types) have been around for about a year and a half now. They have been tried in different formats and with different audiences, many educators have written about their experiences of teaching MOOCs, and universities have started to release data on their courses. Now that we have a better understanding of this new instructional format, we can start to look at what makes a MOOC successful and what doesn’t work, so we can begin to outline some best practices for creating massive digital learning environments. Over a series of two articles, we’ll explore the qualities of good MOOCs, especially as they related to workforce and corporate learning. In this first article, we’ll look at some overarching qualities of good online education, and in the next we’ll examine some more course-specific factors of MOOC success. Knowledge of target audience Although true MOOCs are open for anyone to take, it’s still essential to keep the target audience in mind when designing the courses. Udacity learned this lesson the hard way in its pilot program with San Jose State University that took place earlier this year. The pilot program, which involved basic math courses, was run for two semesters. In the spring semester, the courses were offered to students at San Jose State as well as some high school students from low-income areas. The result? Only about one-quarter of the students passed. In a later analysis, it was discovered that some of the students didn’t even have access to computers, which obviously made taking the courses next to impossible. In the summer, the pilot program ran again, this time with a more "traditional" MOOC audience (i.e., many students already held bachelor’s degrees and had access to computers). This time, the pass rate topped 50 percent. The take-home message is that MOOCs are not a one-size-fits-all solution. They are like all other courses, digital or instructor-led: successful course design must take the characteristics and needs of the learners into account. Appropriate technology The technology used in MOOCs can be divided into two categories: platforms and other tools. Several platforms are available that can be used to host MOOCs, including edX (which is open-source), Blackboard’s Course Sites, and a variety of learning management systems. With potentially thousands of people signing up for a course, the number one consideration when choosing a technology should be user friendliness, i.e., intuitive navigation. A study on learner satisfaction with the interactive elements in MOOCs found that usability was very important, but learners often rated it negatively for their courses. Learners need to be able to find the course content and answers to their questions easily; otherwise, they may become demotivated to continue the course. The other aspect of technology that needs to be considered is the tools used. MOOCs provide the opportunity to use a huge variety of digital tools, including multimedia, social media, collaborative documents, simulations, and much more. But technology that doesn’t work leads very quickly to frustration, and MOOC designers need to select tools carefully to ensure that they are enriching the online learning experience rather than detracting from it. For example, Coursera’s "Fundamentals of Online Education" course was abruptly canceled after one week following a large number of complaints (not to mention bad publicity) when 41,000 students simultaneously attempted to edit a Google spreadsheet. What could have been an excellent course was ruined by choosing the wrong tool. Offline support Too often, online learning is expected to take place in a vacuum, and that has been one of the main criticisms of MOOCs. But that’s not how real learning occurs. A Harvard/MIT study of edX’s "Circuits and Electronics" course found that all else being equal, students who received offline support, from either fellow students or subject matter experts, did better than students who worked alone. Offline support is essential for institutions considering offering MOOCs for credit or organizations who want to use them as part of training programs. Even if learners will follow MOOCs in a self-paced, independent format, providing opportunities for them to support one another can significantly increase their success. Motivation It’s no secret that MOOC retention rates are low, but a large part of that can be attributed to learner intent: many people enroll in the courses out of curiosity, never intending to actually complete them. One possible reason many people don’t even plan to complete MOOCs is that they have no real motivation to do so—most MOOCs do not provide any kind of credit or meaningful credential, so people are not motivated to finish them. Businesses that want to use MOOCs in their training programs need to think about the best way to translate MOOCs into meaningful credentials. Models that are already being used include verified certificates (offered by all of the major MOOC providers), XSeries certificates (a new MOOC bundling credential from edX), and digital badges (see the Mozilla Open Badges project). Outcomes measurement Stephen Downes, who along with George Siemens taught the very first MOOC in 2008, highlighted in May a major problem with MOOCs: the fact there is usually no outcomes measurement. Downes proposes a system for outcomes measurement in academic MOOCs, but businesses and other organizations also need to think about why they chose the MOOC model over other forms of instruction and how they will measure whether or not the programs are successful. Indeed, it is essential to consider the outcomes of any training program, regardless of how it is delivered. As Downes wrote, "Without outcomes measurement we cannot measure success, we can’t focus our efforts toward that success, we can’t become more competitive and efficient, we can’t plan for change and improvement, and we can’t define what you want to accomplish as a result." This article has described five global factors that need to be accounted for in designing a successful MOOC. The next post will discuss some local, or course-based, factors of MOOC success. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson (Visited 68 times, 1 visits today)