As we saw in the previous post, real data on MOOCs is just starting to become available. Using the results of studies, as well as the combined experiences of instructors and learners, we can start to define the factors that make MOOCs successful. The first article took a global approach, focusing on technology, support, and other aspects of the digital learning environment. This article takes a more microscopic approach, exploring MOOCs on the level of individual courses. Clear objectives There are many different types of MOOCs out there and many different ways to participate in them. This is one of the great advantages of the format—it is flexible so learners can adapt the courses to meet their individual needs (e.g., determining their own objectives, choosing what content to engage with, deciding which social learning tools to use, etc.). But more formal environments, like corporate training, require clearly stated and achievable objectives that are directly relevant to the job requirements. Even when using third-party MOOCs or MOOC elements, trainers may need to develop the desired learning objectives and communicate them to learners. Accountability As informal learning environments, MOOCs don’t have any built-in accountability. But as training and development departments are well aware, no accountability usually leads to no results. Accountability can be incorporated into MOOCs in a couple of ways. For example, a high school in Missouri is experimenting with allowing students to take MOOCs for credit. In addition to completing the courses, students are required to demonstrate their learning by completing a project. Businesses that want to benefit from MOOCs should consider ways, beyond certificates of completion, to hold employees accountable for their training. Instructor as facilitator The availability of information online has steadily been changing the role of the instructor in classrooms from elementary schools to corporate universities. Instructors no longer need to focus on delivering content, because content is available at our fingertips. As Kyle Peck wrote over at Evolllution, "People can learn without being taught. Technologies can do a better job of conveying information and developing understanding than can lectures." MOOCs should not just be regular courses videotaped and put online—this method is not only inefficient in terms of learning, but also it doesn’t put the technology to its best possible use. Good MOOCs are designed from the ground up as complete digital learning environments, and part of this design is to shift the role of the instructor from being primarily a deliverer of content to being a facilitator for learning. In a facilitator role, instructors point learners to curated resources, initiate and moderate discussions, and provide opportunities for students to connect with one another. They also design meaningful assessments and develop ways to provide feedback, such as through peer-reviewed assignments.   Interactivity Interactivity in MOOCs happens in three main ways: learner-instructor, learner-learner, and learner-content. In general, learner-instructor interactivity is relatively limited due to the sheer number of students, though Coursera has been experimenting with volunteer "community teaching assistants." Learner-learner interactivity can take place via discussion boards, social media, blogs, and chat rooms, to name just a few, but just opening a discussion board or starting a Twitter conversation is not enough to ensure effective interaction. A recent study published in the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching evaluated the use of a Stanford MOOC in a blended learning environment and found that students preferred to interact in local communities (i.e., with others in the face-to-face section of the course) than in global communities (the MOOC as a whole). Organizations using MOOCs for T&D can enhance the interactivity of the courses by providing virtual spaces for users to interact locally, such as within a workgroup or department. These conversations and discussions can even contribute to an organizational knowledge base. Finally, learner-content interaction can be maximized through multimedia, simulations, gamification, and other strategies that go beyond clicking through a PowerPoint deck. Group activities In addition to online discussions, good MOOCs also encourage user engagement and participation through group projects and activities. For example, learners in corporate MOOCs can role play, practice presentation and speaking skills, write business plans, and so on. Using collaboration technologies like Google Docs and Skype, these learners don’t need to be in the same room, or even in the same country. Group activities enhance the element of peer learning, which is responsible for a majority of the learning in business environments, and help ensure that learners are keeping up with the course. They can also foster communication and culture-building throughout an organization. Over the past two articles, we’ve identified ten factors that contribute to MOOC success. Some of these factors are general guidelines for effective training, some are best practices for online learning, and others focus on gaining the maximum benefit from the technologies that make MOOCs unique. Not all of these factors are present in all MOOCs, but the format is flexible enough that it can be easily adapted to include them. For example, a company could require its employees to enroll in a Coursera course and then set up spaces for offline support, local interactivity, and group collaboration. Taking all of these factors together, it becomes clear that MOOCs are not just a new technology in which to place existing training courses. Rather, the format and the myriad technologies available give us the tools we need to completely redesign the training process from the ground up, and innovative companies are starting to take advantage of these tools to create new, more engaging and more effective, models of instruction.  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:Learner-Centered Instruction in MOOCsNew MOOC Models: Blended LearningNew MOOC Environments: Distributed Open Collaborative…How MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILTKey Factors in MOOC Success, Part 1(Visited 36 times, 1 visits today)

Modern education is currently at a crossroads. Steadily marching down one road are MOOCs—the massive online courses that are changing the way teachers teach and the way learners learn, both online and in the classroom. Charging down the other is the idea of learner-centered instruction, which has been steadily gaining popularity in training and development departments. On the surface, it seems like these two forces are in opposition to each other—MOOCs involve expanding virtual classrooms to hold literally thousands of people, while learner-centered instruction involves shrinking the classroom to focus on the needs of individuals. But these two trends are not nearly so far apart as you might think. Although one of the biggest criticisms of MOOCs is that they offer a one-size-fits-all approach to a many-sided problem, the digital learning environment (and the technology-enabled learning tools that support it) is flexible enough to allow for personalized, learner-centered approaches to instruction. MOOC pioneer George Siemens defines learner-centered instruction like this: "In a true learner-centered environment, the learner is the beginning and end point of the learning process, and his/her needs are the focus of the course/program/organization….Basically, the learner, not the instructor, organization, or software, is in control of the learning experience." As instructional designer Karen Sieczka notes, learner-centered training is well tailored to how adults learn—rather than "force-feeding information," the goal is to provide learners with knowledge and skills that they can immediately apply to their jobs. The information needs be realistic, relevant, and delivered in the way adults learn best. The benefits of learner-centered instruction are many: first and foremost, in terms of creating valuable learning experiences, it seems to work very, very well. MOOC critics have been quick to label the courses as teacher-centered, rather than learner-centered. This is because currently the dominant model is that found on Coursera: students watch video lectures and do readings, and then take tests or do assignments. This approach is teacher-centered, but that doesn’t make this a valid argument against MOOCs in general. Larry Cuban, a professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, has noted that MOOCs are often confused with pedagogy, which is inaccurate. He writes: "Conflating MOOCs with instructional methods misleads professors, students, and the public about what teachers teach and what students learn." A MOOC is a powerful method of delivering a course, but a teacher still teaches it. There is no reason that MOOCs can’t be used to create learner-centered digital learning environments, and in fact several MOOCs (including the very first MOOC and several courses found on smaller providers like Canvas Network and NovoEd) already are. So, how can we create a learner-centered environment in a MOOC? Maryellen Weimer, who literally wrote the book on the subject, has identified five characteristics of learner-centered teaching. Let’s see how these characteristics can be applied to MOOCs: 1. Learner-centered teaching engages students in the hard, messy work of learning. MOOCs, almost by definition, are hard and messy. They require learners to be independent and self-motivated, and to take ownership over their own learning experiences. For organizations, this means learners need to be given the opportunities, the tools, and the support they need to be responsible for their own learning. This can range from providing time in the day for employees to access their courses to ensuring that the courses are compatible with mobile devices. 2. Learner-centered teaching includes explicit skill instruction. This characteristic is practically built in as many training and development programs are geared specifically toward explicit skill instruction. Breaking up learning into bite-sized chunks, which is the hallmark of most MOOCs, supports skill acquisition by providing learners with clear objectives and the tools to reach those objectives without having to invest a significant amount of time. 3. Learner-centered teaching encourages students to reflect on what they are learning and how they are learning it. According to Weimer, "the goal is to make students aware of themselves as learners and to make learning skills something students want to develop." This goal can be accomplished in various ways in MOOCs, including providing discussion prompts and developing assignments that ask learners to reflect on their own learning processes. This reflection doesn’t necessarily need to be formalized into the training process; even casual conversations around the water cooler or on Twitter can provoke reflection and discussion. 4. Learner-centered teaching motivates students by giving them some control over learning processes. In a MOOC, almost the entire learning process is self-directed. Learners decide what they need to learn and can access the information at the moment of need; they decide when, where, and at what pace they engage with the course; they find and share content; and they develop their own personal learning networks. This leads to feelings of autonomy and self-efficacy, which are vital components of learner motivation. 5. Learner-centered teaching encourages collaboration. Collaboration is another major hallmark of good MOOCs. As we have explored on several previous occasions, students in MOOCs participate in conversations on discussion boards and social media platforms, work together on projects using collaboration tools, share content via social bookmarking sites, and more. Used properly, MOOCs can greatly increase the levels of interactivity and collaboration in training programs, especially considering the baseline in many organizations is lectures, seminars, or individual elearning, which often involve no collaboration at all. When we think about MOOCs and their applications in 21st century digital learning environments, we need to keep in mind the distinction Larry Cuban describes between technology, or format, and pedagogy. MOOCs are powerful platforms for delivering instruction, but they are not in themselves pedagogies. Instead, they allow organizations to create and deliver training courses to meet their needs while still benefiting from the best practices in instructional design, including a learner-centered approach to teaching. This is just one more area where MOOCs are expanding the boundaries of what is possible in education. 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:Key Factors in MOOC Success, Part 2New MOOC Environments: Distributed Open Collaborative…MOOCs and MicrolearningKey Factors in MOOC Success, Part 1New MOOC Models: Blended Learning(Visited 36 times, 1 visits today)

The entire corporate and workplace training landscape is shifting. I’m not talking just new technologies or new formats, though these things have certainly been some of the major players. I’m talking an entirely new concept of what training means. There are two main forces driving the shift in training: ROI. Businesses have historically been very bad at measuring the return-on-investment of their training programs. Trainings are too often evaluated based on hours of seat-time, rather than by any real assessment of knowledge and skills. But many companies have started to wise up—the current business environment is too competitive for organizations to invest time and money in training without observing any impact on the bottom line. And when you start to actually look at the numbers, it becomes apparent that many traditional forms of instructor-led training are frankly not worth it: people forget 90 percent of what they learn sitting in a classroom, often by the time they walk out the door. Content is no longer king. In 1996, Bill Gates wrote a famous article in which he declared content to be king. But today, content is everywhere—we have more content available at our fingertips than we know what to do with! The trick now is for companies to realize value from that content, which in training and development means knowledge and skills that can be immediately applied on the job—in other words, providing relevant training that employees can actually use. The need for real results, coupled with the abundance of content, has meant that training models based solely on knowledge transfer are becoming obsolete. What is replacing these models? A combination of knowledge transfer and performance support. Performance support is just-in-time learning that puts the knowledge employees need in their hands exactly at the moment they need it—not before (when they are unlikely to remember it), not after (when it is no longer useful), but right then and there. Performance support can take many forms: the quintessential types are checklists and other job aids, but in its broadest definition, performance support can include apps, YouTube videos, wikis and other knowledge bases, and even other people. Effective performance support is embedded (i.e., the learning takes place in the course of, rather than separate from, the work), guides workflows and processes, and gives people real-time access to the information they need. The idea of performance support is not new, but new learning-enabled technologies and digital learning environments are expanding its possibilities and bringing it to the attention of many organizations. Now, companies that want to effectively train their employees and ensure employees actually remember what they learn are looking for ways to integrate both knowledge transfer and performance support into their training programs. Massive open online courses (MOOCs), which are the rising stars of the corporate training world, provide the perfect opportunity for businesses to do exactly that. Performance support has not been a large focus of the MOOC discussion thus far, but now seems like an excellent time to open the conversation. As Gary Wise recently wrote on his Living in Learning blog, "MOOCs came from an academic birthright, and they are structured to accomplish the transfer of knowledge in some very innovative "flipped classroom" approaches that are less structured and open to participants to discover and learn through multiple forms of content delivery, media, and venues. Perfect. This will work in the corporate world as well. My question is why stop here? Let’s flip the whole dynamic learning and support ecosystem, not just the classroom." MOOCs are more than just online courses—they use new technologies in an innovative format, but more than that they represent a new way of thinking about workplace training and development. The features of these new digital learning environments enable them to serve both as training courses and as performance support that can be used long after the courses are completed. Here are several aspects of MOOCs that blur the traditional boundaries between training and performance support: Course archives. The key to using MOOCs both as courses and performance support is the availability of various resources in easily accessible archives. For example, for many MOOCs on Coursera, students can login even after the course is over and still have access to the materials, discussion boards, and so on. Content. OK, I know I just said that content is no longer king, but some MOOC content is different. Most of the content in MOOCs is delivered as short videos. These resources, especially task-specific tutorials, can be used later as performance support. In a sense, a MOOC can be seen as a way to guide learners through a curated collection of relevant resources that they can later access at the point of need. People. In addition to delivering knowledge and skills, one of the main goals of MOOCs is to foster connections between people. Through discussion boards, social media, virtual collaborations, and so on, learners develop their own personal learning networks that last long after the course is over. These networks, which may contain fellow learners, trainers, and even experts in the field, remain accessible via Twitter and other social networking sites and provide additional places employees can turn for answers to questions and solutions to problems. Resource sharing. Trainers can analyze workflows and create checklists, but often the best job aids are developed by the people who are actually using them. MOOCs are built on a philosophy of sharing, and by encouraging learners to create and share resources—via social bookmarking sites (e.g., Delicious and Pinterest), wikis, and other user-contributed knowledge bases—organizations can harness the knowledge of both instructors and learners to create highly effective performance support. Mobile learning. MOOCs haven’t gone completely mobile yet, but it’s coming, and soon all of these resources and more will be available to learners wherever they are. MOOCs and performance support are both on the rise in corporate training. Separately, they have the potential to change how companies think about and implement their training programs, but their benefits will be significantly compounded when these trends converge into an entirely new model of organizational learning. 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:How MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILTMOOCs and Unbundled TrainingKey Factors in MOOC Success, Part 2MOOCs and MicrolearningHow to MOOC: Meaningful Assessment Through Real-World…(Visited 27 times, 1 visits today)

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been around for almost two years, and in that time, a large amount of data about the courses has been generated. Now, researchers are starting to probe what kinds of students take MOOCs, why they take them, and what factors contribute to individual student success. These are important, no doubt, particularly in higher education, but companies interested in using MOOCs for training and development are also interested in the success of the courses as a whole—not just for individual students, but for organizations overall. This is an especially interesting issue for a couple of reasons: first, there is no consensus on how to measure the success of a MOOC in any environment, and second, companies are notoriously bad at measuring the returns on investment of their training programs in general. Over the course of of two articles, I will explore what constitutes meaningful measurement of training and how this measurement can be applied to MOOCs.  How Is MOOC Success Measured? This question has generated a significant amount of controversy. The first metric to be considered was the number of students completing the courses with passing grades (usually defined as 70 percent or better). Depending how you look at it, this metric leads to either an excellent or a terrible conclusion. If you consider the actual numbers of students, MOOCs have successfully educated millions of people worldwide, and instructors have been able to reach more students in a single class than they normally could in an entire career. But, if you instead consider the percentage of students who complete MOOCs, the picture is quite different—fewer than 10 percent of students who sign up for MOOCs stick it out until the end. But this is not really a valid way to measure success. As I described in an earlier post, many people sign up for MOOCs without ever intending to finish them, so completion rates don’t really tell us much. Raw numbers of students may be better, but without knowing what students were required to do to complete a course, they still don’t really tell us anything meaningful. So, what would be a meaningful measure of MOOC success? The current move in education, which is also valid for training and development, is to measure a MOOC according to its value. Then the question becomes, "What constitutes value?" To determine a MOOC’s value for education, Owen Youngman of Northwestern University suggests going straight to the source and asking the students. But for organizations, where training departments often need to constantly justify their existence and their expenses, we need to develop a more concrete way to measure value. How Are Training Programs Evaluated? Identifying a meaningful way to measure the value of MOOCs in organizations is complicated by the difficulty of measuring the ROI of training programs in general. The most widely used (at least in theory) method of evaluating training programs is the four-level model developed by Donald Kirkpatrick. According to this model, the four levels are: Reaction - The way learners react to their experience of the course Learning - The new knowledge, skills, and attitudes gained from the course Behavior - How well the new knowledge, skills, and attitudes are applied on the job Results - Reduced turnover, improved job performance and satisfaction, improved organizational performance, etc. I mentioned that this method is widely used—at least in theory. This is because in reality evaluation usually stops after Level 1: Reaction. Employees are asked to rate their satisfaction with various aspects of a course (often using what are known as "smiley sheets"), and then the evaluation is over. Despite the fact that the goal of training for employees is to learn knowledge, skills, and attitudes they can apply on the job (Level 3), and for organizations the goal is demonstrable improvements in the bottom line (Level 4), these outcomes are rarely measured. According to a 2006 report by Bersin & Associates, organizations feel that the number one most important thing to measure is how training programs impact employees’ jobs and the business, but less than 10 percent of organizations actually measure these outcomes. Clearly there is ample room for improvement. The key to measuring the effect of training programs on higher-level outcomes is twofold: First, for each course or program, create a list of agreed-upon metrics that will be used to measure success. Second, decide how each metric will be determined. As much as possible, tie each metric to a specific number or dollar value. For example, customer satisfaction, productivity, and turnover and retention rates can easily be converted into hard values. For less tangible metrics, like decision making, change leadership, and communication, use a combination of hard values and anecdotal evidence, as advocated by Jack Philips of the ROI Institute. In this article, we’ve examined some of the challenges associated with measuring the success of MOOCs and training programs in general. In the next post, I’ll explore some specific recommendations for how the tools and principles behind MOOCs can be used to assess the impact of training on the different levels in Kirkpatrick’s model. 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:Measuring Success (ROI) of a Training MOOC, Part 2By the Numbers: Learning from MOOCsKey Factors in MOOC Success, Part 1How to MOOC: Meaningful Assessment Through Real-World…Top 10 Training Metrics(Visited 51 times, 1 visits today)

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a rising trend in corporate and workplace training. The courses are still fairly new, and many questions remain to be answered. Currently, one of the hottest topics is how to measure the success of a MOOC. Although once everything is up and running, the marginal cost associated with MOOCs can approach zero, they still require significant upfront investments of both time and money. Organizations interested in using MOOCs as part of their training programs need to have a clear idea of the benefits they will realize—preferably reflected in their bottom line. In the previous post, I outlined the four-level model of evaluation developed by Donald Kirkpatrick. Here, we’ll explore how MOOCs and the data that comes out of them can be used to measure success at each of these four levels. Level 1: Reaction The reaction level refers to the way learners react to their experience of the course. Typically, this is assessed using "smiley sheets," on which participants rate different aspects of the course on a Likert scale. This process usually happens immediately after a course is completed, and unfortunately it often represents the only evaluation that actually takes place. Measuring success at this level is easily adopted into a MOOC, with the opportunity to collect much, much more data. In most MOOCs, the core content is delivered via video, and all of the learners’ interaction with the course materials takes place online. To increase engagement, many videos have quizzes embedded, and polls and surveys are common throughout the courses as well as during synchronous elements like live webinars. Rather than handing out a smiley sheet at the end, instructors can incorporate Level 1 evaluation into the MOOC by using polls and surveys to assess learners’ reactions in real time. In this way, not only will instructors be able to gather reaction data to individual elements of the course, but they will be able to use the data to make adjustments to the course if necessary. Level 2: Learning Learning in training programs is famously difficult to measure, but MOOCs provide a wealth of data that can be used to assess the progress of learning in real time. Depending on the platform and the data collection programs, learning management systems can collect massive amounts of data from MOOCs, including time on task, how learners interact with the course material, how many times they have to answer a question to get it right, and much, much more. The idea of combining big data with learning analytics is still very new, but already it is providing a powerful way to assess learning and engagement that wasn’t available before. Level 3: Behavior For learners and organizations, this is the most important individual level of measurement—the ability of learners to apply the new knowledge, skills, and attitudes they acquire in courses to their work. In the end it is the behavioral outcomes, not satisfaction with the training or how long it takes to work through a course, which will determine the impact of the program on an organization’s bottom line. This seem like the most opaque category of outcomes, but many newer MOOCs provide an excellent way to directly measure how well learning translates into behavior—by using real problems and projects as course assessments. Many instructor-led training programs don’t have much in the way of evaluation at all, and even traditional elearning relies far too heavily on multiple-choice assessment. But MOOCs, in which huge numbers of learners share resources, hold virtual discussions, and collaborate on projects, provide an ideal environment for incorporating the desired new behaviors directly into the training. This practice blurs the line between "training" and "work" and allows employees to put their newly acquired knowledge, skills, and attitudes directly into practice. This can help foster a learning mindset throughout the organization and also give learners a chance to practice their new skills, like decision making, in a lower-pressure, but real-world, environment such as a simulation. See here for a more in-depth look at how some companies are using MOOCs to solve real business problems. Level 4: Results Here is where all of the standard metrics—reduced turnover, increased job satisfaction, increased productivity, increased customer satisfaction, and so on—come into play. If the training program has proved successful at the other levels (particularly Level 3: Behavior), then Level 4 should emerge quite nicely. Remember that in order to achieve valid results, organizations need to decide in advance what metrics are tied to each course as well as how those metrics will be measured—in hard numbers if possible. At this fourth level, there are two final things that are important to keep in mind. First, training is an investment, not a cost. What’s important is the ROI an organization will realize as a result of the training program, and for some metrics (like the bottom line) this return may take a longer to show up than, for example, the reaction data on smiley sheets, but the costs of not training employees are infinitely higher than the investment in training them. Second, measuring the ROI of training programs in general is very new, and thus far it is virtually untested in MOOCs. So, if the first numbers don’t look as good as hoped, instructors can use them as guides for how to improve the courses in the future. This points to an additional advantage of MOOCs—because the courses are broken up into bite-sized pieces, if something isn’t working, it’s easy to replace just that portion of the course and immediately put the new material in the hands of all learners. MOOCs are still very new players in the corporate training environment. The goal of these two articles has been to explore a way to meaningfully assess the value of training MOOCs, a topic that will have increased relevance in the near future as more companies adopt this new format and the evaluation tools improve. 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:Measuring Success (ROI) of a Training MOOC, Part 1MOOC Analytics: What Corporate Training Can Learn from Big…How to MOOC: Meaningful Assessment Through Real-World…Beyond Cost-Savings: Advantages of MOOCs for Corporate…7-Steps to Creating an Effective E-learning Program Part 5:…(Visited 44 times, 1 visits today)

The education and training worlds are fond of buzzwords, too many of which tend to be old ideas wrapped in shiny new packaging. But there is one buzzword that is set to transform the way we think about education from higher education classrooms to corporate training and development departments: unbundling. We are all familiar with the concept of bundling—we use Expedia to get better prices by bundling our flights, hotels, and car rentals together, and we bundle our cable and Internet packages to save money as well. While bundling may be great for saving money on vacations and utilities, the all-in-one format that is currently the standard in education seems to have run its course. Now, thought leaders are exploring ways to improve education by breaking it into its component parts. One of the biggest current proponents of unbundling in the education sphere is Anant Agarwal, MIT professor and president of massive open online course (MOOC) provider edX. In a December Huffington Post article, Agarwal characterized unbundling as focusing on three major aspects of education: time, function, and content. Briefly, the idea of unbundling time refers to moving away from the traditional four-year degree formula and instead imagining "an alternative path of lifelong continuous education," which may involve formal classes at various institutions, MOOCs, real-world experiences, and pretty much any other form of learning. Unbundling function refers to partnering with other organizations to provide services like facilities management, healthcare, food service, and other functions that are not central to the main goal of providing an education. Finally, unbundling content refers to using various forms of content—digital textbooks, MOOCs, open educational resources, etc.—depending on the needs of the course and the learners. Agarwal’s vision is a new system that takes advantage of new educational technologies, like MOOCs, to provide the kind of education modern students need: one that emphasizes learning as a lifestyle and takes into account knowledge, skills, and attitudes obtained from many different sources. This vision is pretty revolutionary, but colleges and universities are starting to take note—already MIT has released a report describing unbundling as a new model for education. Organizations can also benefit from unbundling their training and development programs, particularly as it refers to time and content. First, unbundling time. Time is perhaps even more of a pressing issue for companies than it is for higher education institutions. Employees need training, and that training needs to be delivered quickly, efficiently, and often—in today’s rapidly changing environment, a continuous program of training is the only way to ensure that employees’ knowledge and skills are kept up-to-date and that businesses remain competitive. Most traditional training programs, which rely on one or a few days of instructor-led training over the course of a year simply don’t cut it anymore. Not only do these programs focus too heavily on "seat-time," but learners are apt to forget almost everything as soon as they walk out the door because they don’t have an immediate opportunity to apply it. The MOOC format can help organizations to unbundle time by providing on-demand, widespread access to training courses, resources, personal learning networks, performance support, and more, when and where the employees need those resources. Training time becomes embedded in the workday, rather than taking place outside of it. Organizations can benefit from unbundling content by using a variety of resources located around the Web—articles, YouTube videos, even full MOOCs—as learning materials for their employees. There are many excellent resources out there, which in the context of a MOOC can be curated and shared through social media, social bookmarking, wikis, and so on. Unbundling content gives trainers the greatest flexibility in designing courses and gives learners the opportunity to participate in the creation of an organizational knowledge base. There is another type of unbundling happening in education that has particular importance for organizations: unbundling learning from credentials. As corporate branding, marketing, and training guru Jeanne Meister recently told Online Educa: "Unbundling learning will be the future, as providers detach the coursework from the certificate, allowing learners to participate in various strands of learning, and opting in to a verified certificate of completion. Online learning modules are not completed with a degree or certificate but also include the ability to share one’s increased knowledge on a social network. Using education to advance your personal brand and long-term employability will become increasingly important as employers use data analytics to find top talent online." The MOOC format is ideal for unbundling time, content, and learning in a training context: courses can be long or short—designed to meet the needs of a diverse group of learners; content can be created or curated by both instructors and learners and shared across an organization’s learning network; and training certificates can be unbundled into mini-credentials, like digital badges. Overall, using the MOOC format to unbundle training will result in some huge benefits for organizations: More focus on knowledge and skills acquired, less on time spent in a classroom. Better development of and access to organizational knowledge through collective creation and sharing of learning resources. New forms of credentials that represent real knowledge and skills that can be applied. Unbundling is likely to be a major topic of conversation in the training sphere this year. As you make your training and development plans for the year, think about how using an unbundled MOOC format can help your organization meet its goals in 2014 and beyond. 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:13 Megatrends in MOOCsHow MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILTMOOCs and Performance SupportMegatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate Universities2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?(Visited 27 times, 2 visits today)

Source: Top10OnlineColleges.org Related Posts:Are MOOCs the Future of Online Education?What Determines Value in Training?New MOOC Models: Blended LearningMOOCs: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, and Where We’re…The Rise of the Digitals(Visited 33 times, 1 visits today)

If you’ve been following the MOOC news, you’ll know that massive open online courses have had their ups and downs. In 2012, which the New York Times dubbed "the year of the MOOC," traditional higher education found itself truly threatened by new forces. Hopes for the courses were high and so was the pushback, but the conversation had begun. Then, in 2013, MOOCs started to really take off and evolve—millions of people participated in the free online courses, and new formats began to emerge, some of which I’ve explored in this blog. Also in 2013, companies started to sit up and take notice. More organizations became faced with skills gaps, which came in two major flavors. First, companies were having even more difficulty finding qualified candidates to fill job openings—recent college and university graduates simply didn’t have the skills the companies required. And second, with technology changing so quickly, even current employees were falling behind. Traditional higher education was becoming inadequate for preparing people to enter the workforce, and traditional instructor-led training was becoming inadequate for keeping employees’ skills relevant and up to date. Faced with these challenges, a few pioneer companies started to turn to MOOCs as a way to train large numbers of learners in a short time and at a relatively low cost. But many companies remained skeptical about MOOCs, perhaps waiting to see their results in higher education before overhauling their own training programs. Well, the results are starting to come in—MOOCs continue to be hugely popular (more than 10 million students have enrolled worldwide), there are now more than 1200 courses available, and all three major MOOC providers (Coursera, edX, and Udacity) are working toward developing alternative credentials that may end up competing with the traditional degree when it comes to organizations’ hiring decisions. With these developments, more companies are seeing MOOCs as promising models of training and development, and 2014 will quite possibly be the year the massive courses really start to make waves in corporate training. Bersin by Deloitte, which analyzes trends in human resources, talent, and learning, recently released its 2014 Corporate Learning Factbook, and for training in general, and technology-based training in particular, the future looks very bright. As Josh Bersin put in a recent Forbes article: "The economic recovery is clearly here: spending on corporate training is soaring." Here are some highlights from his assessment: In the United States, spending on corporate training increased 15 percent last year, representing the highest rate of growth over the past 7 years. More than 7 in 10 organizations say "capability gaps" is one of their top five challenges, and many report that it takes between 3 and 5 years for employees to become "fully productive." High-performing companies spend more than average on training, suggesting that the increased investment pays off. Technology is changing how training is done. Less than half of total training time is spent in a classroom, with nearly 20 percent being delivered via mobile devices. Companies are using digital learning environments to expand the reach of their training programs. The learning management system (LMS) market is also expanding rapidly, and MOOCs are set "to radically impact corporate training, as branded universities put more and more courses online." In 2014, these trends are expected to continue: organizations will pour even more money into their training programs and increase their use of technology. How will that happen? Well, in a SlideShare presentation posted last December, Bersin suggests that more and more companies will likely start using MOOCs. According to the presentation, 70 percent of Bersin by Deloitte members are interested in exploring MOOCs for corporate training, and while only about 7 percent of organizations are currently using them, nearly one-third have plans to start doing so. But MOOCs are more than just new training formats—they are more like all-in-one vehicles for recruitment, training and development, and even advertising and customer relations. Bersin identifies seven main ways companies are using MOOCs: Building talent pipelines Onboarding new employees Self-directed development Workforce training Educating partners and customers Brand marketing Collaboration and innovation MOOCs can be powerful training tools for corporations partly because many employees are already using them to upgrade their skills. And while much is made of the low completion rates associated with most MOOCs, this limitation doesn’t really apply to the corporate training environment. According to Alan Ruby, a MOOC researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, "when people are using a MOOC to upgrade their knowledge on something specific for their industry, the completion rate is much better." In fact, when learners pay the nominal fee (starting at $39) for a verified certificate on Coursera, the completion rate approaches 90 percent, which is probably more than can be said for most non-mandatory, non-compliance-related training and development programs available through either instructor-led training or traditional online courses. Over the next few articles, we’ll explore the new ways MOOCs allow companies to train and interact with their employees as well as communicate with customers, focusing on the seven ways companies are using MOOCs identified by Josh Bersin. By the end of the series, you will hopefully be convinced to give these new digital learning environments a try. 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:Using MOOCs: Self-Directed Development and Workforce…Using MOOCs: Finding and Onboarding New EmployeesMegatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate UniversitiesUsing MOOCs: Partner and Customer Relations13 Megatrends in MOOCs(Visited 102 times, 1 visits today)

Computer-based training (CBT) has been around in some form for roughly 50 years, and in that time it has generated a significant amount of buzz. Two of the biggest promises of CBT have been universal access to education (especially with the growth of online and mobile technologies) and adaptive learning—the ability to personalize learning experiences for individuals. Now, with massive open online courses (MOOCs) continuing to proliferate and new adaptive learning technologies popping up, it looks like 2014 might be the year these two promises are finally realized, together. MOOCs and adaptive learning have not quite gelled yet, but there are trends that suggest they will soon. And when they do, the face of workplace and corporate training will change completely. This article briefly reviews what adaptive learning is and how it can improve organizational training and development, and then describes various advancements and technologies that suggest adaptive learning could soon be incorporated into MOOCs to produce some of the most powerful training models we have seen so far. What is adaptive learning? The term adaptive learning has been thrown around a lot lately. It is a buzzword that is frequently equated with "personalized learning" and "customized learning." But what does that really mean? What makes learning adaptive? Wikipedia defines adaptive learning as "an educational method which uses computers as interactive teaching devices. Computers adapt the presentation of educational material according to students’ learning needs, as indicated by their responses to questions and tasks." This definition is a good start, but it leaves out a lot of important details. Is there a test at the end and then the computer re-presents information the learner got wrong or is the learning calibrated throughout the module? What inputs does the computer measure—just right and wrong answers or something more sophisticated? A much more ambitious definition is provided by the company Knewton. And they ought to know! Knewton’s relatively new adaptive learning platform is currently making major waves in education. According to Knewton, "Adaptive learning makes content dynamic and interactive, placing the student at the center of his or her individual learning experience. The platform monitors how the student interacts with the system and learns…It assesses not only what a student knows now, but also determines what activities and interactions…delivered in what sequence and medium, most greatly increase the possibility of that student’s academic success." In other words, adaptive learning creates a learning environment that changes according to the needs of individual students at exactly the time when change is necessary. It relies on psychometrics and data models and algorithms to provide each student with the optimal digital learning environment. That’s quite a promise! Why should companies care about adaptive learning? Many of the current adaptive learning technologies, like the platform developed by Knewton, are aimed at the educational market. But adaptive learning has an equally powerful role to play in organizational training and development, for at least two reasons. First, it can result in much better, and better-liked, learning than was previously possible. Companies are investing billions of dollars every year in computer-based and online training—adaptive technologies can help them ensure they are getting their money’s worth in terms of employees actually learning essential knowledge and applicable skills. Second, it can greatly facilitate compliance training, which seems to get more complex every year. In an article for Corporate Compliance Insights, Jan Sramek, the CEO of enterprise learning platform company Erudify, wrote that adaptive learning can improve compliance training by allowing learners to move quickly through information they already know, which can cut training time by 50 to 80 percent. In short, adaptive learning can improve training and development programs by helping employees learn more, faster. What do MOOCs have to do with adaptive learning? MOOCs themselves have yet to revolutionize education, and adaptive learning alone may or may not be revolutionary, but together these two movements represent a trend to be reckoned with. MOOCs have been criticized as a one-size-fits-all solution to a many-sided problem, but the incorporation of adaptive learning technologies brings with it the possibility of customizing training on a massive scale. With learner models generated from individual users as well as big data, adaptive learning technologies could not only automatically re-present information learners need to review, but also sense for example when they are getting bored and give them a prompt to increase engagement. One of the biggest proponents of adaptive learning MOOCs has been Nish Sonwalkar, a physics professor at the University of Massachusetts who sees huge potential in combining these two new technologies. He recently used an adaptive learning system in his MOOC on molecular biology. You can check out the basic pedagogical and technological frameworks here; learner behavior data are yet to be released. A few other adaptive learning experiments have also made recent headlines. Khan Academy, which is one of the largest repositories of free online learning resources, also tracks student data to provide customized learning. Last year, adaptive language-learning platform Instreamia sponsored a Spanish language MOOC. Even the federal government has joined the fray, with the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recommending the government support efforts to join MOOCs with adaptive learning. When asked by The Chronicle of Higher Education if adaptive software could help personalize the MOOC experience, Michael Feldstein, who used to build personalization tools for Cengage Learning, said "absolutely." According to the Chronicle, Feldstein believes MOOCs and adaptive software form a "natural marriage" and "could help compensate for the absence of individual hand-holding in a massive course." MOOCs and adaptive learning are the no longer just the next generation of digital learning environments: they’re here now. And with the current frantic pace of change in education and training, we will likely be realizing the potential of combining these two technologies in the very near future. 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:Adaptive LeadershipBeyond Cost-Savings: Advantages of MOOCs for Corporate…What Type of MOOC Is Right For You?MOOC: The King is Dead - Long Live the KingMOOC Analytics: What Corporate Training Can Learn from Big…(Visited 108 times, 6 visits today)

If you ask anyone in any company why their organization has a training and development program, you will probably be met with a look of confusion—obviously the purpose of T&D programs is to provide employees with the learning experiences necessary to perform their jobs at the highest level possible. But for MOOCs, it’s a different story. Certainly, they can be used for traditional knowledge transfer and skill building. But these are not your traditional training courses, and as massively open digital learning environments, they are proving to have applications way beyond employee training and development. In his SlideShare presentation "Putting MOOCs to Work," Josh Bersin identifies seven ways companies are using MOOCs, starting with identifying and training new hires all the way through to customer relations and facilitating innovation. In this article, I’ll explore the first two uses: building talent pipelines and on-boarding new employees. Building Talent Pipelines Organizations are currently having major problems finding and retaining qualified employees. The challenge to building talent pipelines comes in two forms: 1) there is a widening gap between the skills companies need and the skills job candidates have and 2) employees are no longer staying at the same company for the duration of their career. In fact, they aren’t staying very long at all—in the United States, employees work for the same company on average for only four years. This presents an additional challenge as many companies report it takes between three and five years for even a seasoned employee to become fully productive. This lack of reliable pipelines is hurting businesses. According a recent study, a majority of UK companies are failing to adequately identify and fill even the positions most critical for their success. MOOCs offer a way for companies to build talent pipelines by collaborating with MOOC providers both to design curriculums and to identify top students. Bersin identifies three main ways companies can do this: Candidate Screening. Both Coursera and Udacity have career placement services through which companies can connect with top students. Sponsorship. Companies can sponsor MOOCs or even full programs. For example, company-sponsored MOOCs are available for learning both SAP and MongoDB, and AT&T is sponsoring Georgia Tech’s $6,600 Computer Science MOOC Master’s program. Consortium. The Open Education Alliance is a consortium of tech companies including Google, Autodesk, and AT&T, who in partnership with Udacity develop curriculums and project-based learning tracks, and have pledged to hire students who successfully complete them. Through these types of programs, companies can announce job openings, identify promising new talent, and offer special courses and products to select students. In a December Harvard Business Review article, Jeanne Meister identified MOOCs as one of the top three social media tools companies are using to find job candidates. And students are starting to respond—the Open Education Alliance’s first programs were sold out prior to their launch in late January. Onboarding New Employees After identifying new employees via MOOCs, companies can also use the courses for onboarding. The process of onboarding typically lasts for about 90 days and can include everything from formal training courses to job shadowing, mentoring, and so on. The costs of onboarding can be significant. According to the Center for American Progress, the cost of replacing employees ranges from 16 percent of annual salary for those making less than $30,000 to more than 200 percent for those in highly paid positions like executives. Especially since employees may stay with the company for only four years, organizations can benefit significantly from cutting costs and increasing efficiency in their onboarding processes. As interactive digital learning environments, MOOCs can provide ways for companies to onboard new hires quickly and regardless of where in the world they are located. Because once a MOOC is developed, the marginal cost of adding learners is essentially zero, this method can be particularly beneficial for onboarding a large number of employees all at once. The benefits become even more striking when the employees are spread across different departments, locations, or even countries. For new hires not located the same geographic area, MOOCs can provide levels of interaction not found in traditional elearning (i.e., isolated in a room with a computer) or even in many instructor-led onboarding programs. This immediate interaction can promote social engagement and, with any luck, reduce the chances they will jump ship early on in the process. The most high-profile example of a company using MOOCs for onboarding is McAfee, which used a flipped classroom model to decrease the time and cost associated with its new hire orientation program, which before the switch required more than 80 hours of training, including pre-work, intensive onsite training, and post-work. According to the company, the new format resulted in not only cost savings, but also significant increases in sales productivity. Labeling MOOCs as just a new format for training and development misses the full potential of the courses. Jeanne Meister had it right in her article for Harvard Business Review—MOOCs can be considered a form of social media. As such, they provide ways for companies to interact with potential employees, long before any hiring decisions are made. The next article in this series will explore two uses of MOOCs that are probably more familiar: self-directed development and workforce training. 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?Using MOOCs: Self-Directed Development and Workforce…Using MOOCs: Partner and Customer RelationsMegatrends in MOOCS: #5 Lifelong LearningHow MOOCs Are Used in Workplace Training(Visited 225 times, 1 visits today)