This series is exploring the seven main ways companies are using MOOCs as identified by Bersin by Deloitte. In the previous article, we looked at building talent pipelines and onboarding new employees: two uses for the massive courses that come at the very beginning of (and even before) a company develops a formal relationship with its employees. This article focuses on two subsequent aspects of that relationship—self-directed development and workforce training—which fit more neatly into traditional ideas about job skills learning and development. Self-Directed Development Many different types of learners take MOOCs, and they do so for many different reasons. One of the major reasons millions of people spend their free time taking online courses is to enhance their job-specific knowledge and skills to advance their career. In fact, more than six out of ten MOOC students take the courses either to learn more about their current field or to prepare themselves to enter a new one. That’s a huge number of learners engaging in self-directed development. I’ve written before about how companies can reward employees who take personal initiatives toward professional development, and in the roughly nine months since I wrote that article, many businesses have started doing exactly that. Companies including Yahoo!, Jardine Lloyd Thompson, and Deloitte now encourage their employees to enroll in MOOCs, and Yahoo! even reimburses employees for the expense of earning a verified certificate. MOOCs used in this way are essentially free training for organizations. Companies that wish to take advantage of their employees’ personal initiative can do so by vetting relevant MOOCs and providing support for employees who are taking them. For example, T&D departments can maintain and distribute a list of recommended MOOCs and their start dates, and even organize local seminars and discussions for employees who choose to enroll. They can also develop supplementary materials and activities to convey proprietary content and encourage critical thinking and interaction among employees. There are many options for how to incorporate employees’ personal learning initiatives into an organizational training program. The important thing is for companies to recognize and support this learning; otherwise, they risk losing valued employees to a company that does. Workforce Training Of the seven ways companies are using MOOCs, this is the one that is most familiar. The annual cost of job training and certification has reached $160 billion, or nearly $1200 per employee, and results of a recent study by Skillsoft suggest that while nearly all CEOs recognize the importance of workforce training, they are looking for ways to make that training faster and more efficient. In fact, more than 40 percent of CEOs say the length of a training program is even more important than the content. According to Skillsoft managing director Kevin Young, "The research shows that business leaders increasingly appreciate the value of learning. However, while training budgets themselves are not being cut, the time businesses have available to undertake training sessions is clearly shrinking….Courses need to be more succinct and to-the-point than ever, delivered in highly relevant, bite-sized pieces." MOOCs have huge potential in workforce training programs because they are design to provide training in those "highly relevant, bite sized pieces" that companies need, at a cost that is relatively low and with an efficiency that makes traditional training look like the Pony Express. These features of MOOCs are especially important now, as knowledge is changing quickly and employees need immediate solutions, not long drawn-out training programs. Coursera’s head of business development Julia Stiglitz made this point in a recent CNBC article, noting that "the companies are looking for new ways to train their employees and get them up to speed on skills that may not have been relevant five years ago." The list of companies that are using MOOCs in their workforce training programs is impressive and growing. It now includes Google, which had 80,000 employees enroll in a Udacity programming course; steel manufacturing giant Tenaris, which is using edX’s platform to deliver training to its employees; and communications company Telus, which has trained more than 40,000 employees via a MOOC-like digital learning environment. Programs like these have met with success. According to the CNBC article cited above, business software management developer Brightpearl has been using Udemy to train salespeople, with the result that the salespeople trained online produced more than 30 percent more revenue than a comparable group taught through traditional instructor-led training. Results like this suggest that these new digital learning environments are not just cost- and time-effective, but also pay off with increased productivity. Much of the writing I’ve done on this blog over the past year has focused on using MOOCs in the ways described in this article. But these represent only two of the seven ways companies have found to capitalize on what is not only a new educational technology, but an entirely new approach to organizational education and communication. In the final article in this series, we’ll look at three uses of MOOCs that definitely do not fit neatly within the bounds of traditional training: educating partners and customers, brand marketing, and collaboration and innovation. These three uses extend the reach of MOOCs way beyond a company’s relationship with its employees to influence how it interacts with its partners and its customers. 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:Megatrends in MOOCS: #5 Lifelong Learning2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?Using MOOCs: Partner and Customer RelationsUsing MOOCs: Finding and Onboarding New EmployeesMegatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate Universities(Visited 94 times, 1 visits today)

This is the last article in our series about how businesses are using MOOCs, as identified by Bersin by Deloitte. In previous articles, we looked at ways MOOCs are being used even before employees are hired, to build talent pipelines, as well as in more conventional training environments, such as for onboarding new employees, self-directed employee development, and workforce training. This final article examines three uses of MOOCs that go far beyond any standard conception of training: educating partners and customers, brand marketing, and collaboration and innovation. Educating Partners and Customers MOOCs are excellent tools for workplace education, but there is no rule that says that education needs to be limited to the workplace! Innovative organizations are using these tools to provide education to partners and customers as well. For example, on the customer side SAP has offered a couple of MOOCs for software developers. Last fall, the company ran a course on how to develop SAP mobile apps so companies could use the software to give employees secure access to data on their own devices. The goal of the course was to educate customers about what the software can do to enhance the increasingly popular BYOD (bring your own device) environments. SAP executive VP Bernd Welz said: "It seems we are really on the right track regarding how to best give people a greater understanding of SAP’s innovations." Businesses are also using MOOCs to educate members of their partner networks. For example, BloomNet is a wire florist retail network owned by 1-800-FLOWERS. The parent company has recently partnered with Udemy to offer courses on everything from finance and accounting to customer service and social media to BloomNet members, which are located around the world. These types of outreach simply weren’t possible before MOOCs came on the scene. Brand Marketing MOOCs thus far have not taken over higher education—only a few institutions accept the courses for credit and only a few students have taken advantage of the credit opportunities. But that hasn’t stopped colleges and universities from continuing to devote resources to developing MOOCs, which now number over 1200. If they aren’t actually using these courses for enrolled students, what benefit are schools getting from MOOCs? One answer is brand marketing. Now, you may argue that elite schools like Harvard and Stanford don’t really need to spend much time marketing themselves—their names are prestigious enough. But smaller, less well-known schools have been experimenting with MOOCs as a way to showcase and promote their traditional degree programs, a kind of try-before-you-buy model. Companies are doing this as well. For example, Bank of America has partnered with Khan Academy to launch the website Better Money Habits, where anyone can go to learn about budgeting, credit scores, savings, and more. Udacity has a full slate of industry partners who work with the company to develop course content and projects, which serve triple-duty as learning resources, customer education, and marketing materials. Just like in higher education, these partnerships represent powerful ways for businesses to gain exposure, reach new audiences, and create new markets for their brand. Collaboration and Innovation The final way companies are using MOOCs is to find innovative solutions to business problems through collaboration. For example, Coursolve is an organization that connects businesses with MOOCs to give students the opportunity to solve real-world problems, and businesses the chance to have their problems solved. Last year, nearly 100,000 students participated in the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business MOOC "Foundations of Business Strategy," offered on Coursera. Through the course, students had the opportunity to work on solving real problems from a list of companies that included GE, Johnson & Johnson, and Samsung, alongside many small businesses. For participating businesses, this model provides the opportunity to have ambitious, highly motivated learners working to solve their problems for free. Stanford’s NovoEd MOOC platform is entirely dedicated to real-world problem-solving through social learning and collaboration. Top students in the "Technology Entrepreneurship" course have the opportunity to work with Silicon Valley mentors and show their ideas to investors. Last fall, selected teams from "The Finance of Retirement and Pensions" MOOC competed for the opportunity to present their ideas for pension reform at a symposium held at Stanford this past January. Courses like these are not about learning knowledge and skills to be applied at some unspecified later date; they are about learning knowledge and skills that are immediately applicable to a problem at hand. As you have hopefully realized from this series of articles, MOOCs are much more than new models of training or new technology-enabled learning tools. They are exciting new digital learning environments, but this description doesn’t even come close to capturing their range of potential uses. After analyzing the ways companies are using MOOCs, it occurs to me that what really sets them apart from traditional training programs is that MOOCs are all about relationship-building. Instructor-led training is often focused squarely on delivering content, but the Internet has made all of the content we could ever possibly want available at our fingertips. MOOCs are different. They contain content, but their goal is what people can do with the content, and that doing takes place in the context of relationships: between companies and employees, companies and customers, companies and business students, and so on. MOOCs expand the concept of training and development from something employees sit through for a few hours every year to something entire organizations engage in every day. By embracing this concept now, companies can start building those learning relationships that will prove essential to their success in the 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:Using MOOCs: Self-Directed Development and Workforce…2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?How MOOCs Are Used in Workplace TrainingMegatrends in MOOCs: #6 More Social, More Collaborative13 Megatrends in MOOCs(Visited 41 times, 1 visits today)

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) like the ones offered by Coursera, edX, and Udacity have been around for about two years now, and over the past year or so, I have written about how they have evolved and the impact they have had on corporate training. Now, after several ups and downs, MOOCs are starting to find their place, and it turns out that place is much larger than could have been anticipated: MOOCs aren’t just disrupting how training is delivered; they are changing how companies interact with their employees and others on a much grander scale. As organizations continue to expand their use of new digital learning environments, we can identify some MOOC megatrends that are starting to shape up. I’ve touched on many of these trends before, but over the course of the next several weeks, we’ll look at each of these trends in turn, defining them, describing where we are in the process, and identifying challenges in their adoption. The goal for this series is to provide a complete picture of the place of MOOCs in training departments and in organizations as a whole. Here are the top 13 megatrends we are seeing in MOOCs: 1. Adoption at Corporate Universities MOOCs are starting to be adopted in corporate universities from tech companies to the manufacturing industry to the financial sector. This is part of an even larger trend in which online, connected digital learning environments are replacing traditional instructor-based and computer-based training formats. 2. Facilitating Learning Organizations In education, MOOCs have moved education out of formal classrooms and expanded the definition of "student" to include anyone with a computer, an Internet connection, and a desire to learn. In the same vein, MOOCs are redefining what training means to companies—training is no longer something that takes place just in seminars and workshops, but rather something that happens constantly, in many different ways, throughout entire organizations. 3. Updating the Competency-Based Training Model Companies in many industries are facing a skills gap, and they need a more efficient way to prepare employees for the workforce. This, along with digital learning environments, are driving a trend toward competency-based training, where the knowledge and skills an employee learns are being decoupled from the time that employee spends learning. In higher education, this has been referred to as the "unbundling of time." 4. Microlearning Paths At the same time as MOOCs are making the training world much bigger, they are in some sense making the scope of that training much smaller. Bite-sized learning and on-demand, employee-driven microlearning are facilitating the integration of training into on-the-job activities. 5. Lifelong Learning One of the biggest impacts MOOCs have had is to make education available to people of all ages. As a result, lifelong learning has become one of the biggest trends in recent years: in their spare time, people who once might have flipped on the television are now booting up their computers to learn and accessing learning resources on their mobile devices whenever they have a few minutes of downtime. Companies can capitalize on this lifelong learning trend both by offering engaging courses to the public and by recognizing their employees’ independent learning endeavors. 6. More Social, More Collaborative One of the biggest criticisms of MOOCs has been that learner-instructor interaction is completely absent and learner-learner interaction is inefficient at best. But this is starting to change. New learning platforms and models are being tested to enhance learning in MOOCs by making the courses more social and more collaborative. 7. Gamification Gamification and MOOCs started to become buzzwords in corporate training at about the same time. Gamification has revolutionized training in general by making it more engaging and more effective. As MOOCs and gamification converge, they will have an immense impact on workplace learning. 8. Mobile Learning As more people are using different types of mobile devices, mobile learning and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) training are being experimented with in many organizations. MOOCs are just starting to go mobile, and this likely represents the next big phase in their development. 9. Flipping the MOOC MOOCs are being used more and more often in flipped blended learning environments. Rather than all training taking place in-person or online, employees watch videos and do some activities online and then come together for practice, role play, problem-solving sessions, and other types of collaborative activities. 10. The Changing Role of the Instructor In training, as in education, the instructor is no longer just a human content-delivery system. With almost all of the world’s knowledge available at our fingertips, instructors are moving from being conveyors of knowledge to being curators and learning guides. This transition is redefining what it means to be a trainer in today’s learning organizations. 11. Alternative Credentials MOOCs and other digital learning environments are causing us to rethink our current model of credentialing, both for traditional students who are prospective employees and for employees participating in training. Verified certificates, digital badges, digital portfolios, knowledge graphs—these and other forms of alternative credentials are being tested in the job market and the workplace. 12. Training for Millennials Millennials and the generations that will come after them are digital natives whose educational, social, and professional lives take place largely online. These younger employees expect their training to be just as digitally connected as the rest of their lives. MOOCs provide one part of the answer for companies looking to attract and retain tomorrow’s top talent. 13. MOOCs as Relationship Builders MOOCs have not just moved training out of the classroom, but out of the company entirely. Today, organizations are experimenting with using MOOCs to build relationships with current employees, prospective employees, customers, and business partners alike. In this way, MOOCs are serving as a new form of educational social media. MOOCs are more than just new digital learning environments. As we work through this list, we will explore how MOOCs are redefining our entire cultural understanding of what education means and how companies can use this new understanding to inform and optimize their training and development programs, now and into the 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:Megatrends in MOOCs: #4 Microlearning PathsMegatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate UniversitiesHow MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILTMegatrends in MOOCS: #5 Lifelong Learning2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?(Visited 187 times, 1 visits today)

In this series, we’ll explore some major Megatrends in how and why MOOCs are being used in corporate training and development programs. The goal is to establish an overall picture of the current place of corporate MOOCs, where they are likely headed, and the challenges they may face on the way. In this first article, we’ll examine MOOCs within the context of the recent rise in corporate universities, which has been driven in part by some of the same forces behind the development of MOOCs. What is a corporate university and why have they become popular? Pepperdine University professor Mark Allen has defined a corporate university as "an educational entity that is a strategic tool designed to assist its parent organization in achieving its mission by conducting activities that cultivate individual and organizational learning, knowledge, and wisdom." Corporate universities are distinct from training departments and traditional universities in that they focus more on helping an organization achieve its mission rather than specifically on helping individual employees do their jobs better. Corporate universities have been in existence in the United States since 1956, when GE established the first one, Crotonville, to train executives in general management. Today, many companies have their own version of the corporate university, whether it is located on a physical campus or, as is happening more and more, online. In recent years, corporate universities are becoming more popular, for two main reasons: Companies are finding that they can greatly benefit from training at all levels that is tailored specifically to their organizational needs. Companies are finding that graduates of traditional universities don’t have the knowledge and skills the organizations require, especially when it comes to leadership positions. As Doug Guthrie wrote last year in Forbes, "Many corporations are creating their own internal universities because they feel business schools have failed at training the managers and leaders needed to run their companies." How do MOOCs fit in with corporate universities? In many ways, the reasons corporate universities have expanded are some of the same reasons that MOOCs are becoming so popular, especially for a growing crop of non-traditional learners: the courses provide a way for learners to get the personalized education they need to succeed in their job and advance their career, and both students and employers are finding that traditional colleges and universities are not satisfactorily preparing graduates to enter the workforce. Recently in corporate universities, the dominant model of education has started to change. Moving away from instructor-led training and traditional computer-based training, companies are starting to transition toward more connected digital learning environments, including MOOCs. One of the biggest stories of the past year was the announcement in November that multinational steel manufacturing company Tenaris would partner with MOOC provider edX to expand the firm’s training and education offerings to its 27,000 employees worldwide. Under the agreement, Tenaris can both develop MOOCs on the edX platform and license courses developed by others. MOOCs can provide several advantages for corporate universities: Collaborative company-wide training. The courses are a way for companies to provide training to employees not only across departments but also around the world. This expands the reach of the corporate university and creates an organization-wide atmosphere of collaboration that is rarely present in either traditional instructor-led or computer-based training. Both in-house and licensed courses. Like Tenaris, companies can both develop their own MOOCs for organization-specific training and use MOOCs developed by others for more general training needs. Licensing courses is significantly less expensive, both in money and in time, than developing them. Training integrated into work. Through on-demand access to learning resources and personal learning networks, MOOCs integrate learning into the regular course of work. Rather than taking time away from work to attend courses at a corporate university (which is often physically located in a different place), employees have access to the knowledge resources they need exactly when they need them. In this way, MOOCs make workplace learning less like sitting in a classroom and more like just doing your job. Less expense, greater flexibility. MOOC platforms are both less expensive and more flexible than many traditional learning management systems (LMSs). They also allow companies to more easily incorporate learning resources from across the Internet into their courses. Overall, MOOCs are powerful tools for corporate universities to have in their training toolbox. What are some challenges to the adoption of MOOCs in corporate universities? It’s difficult to know exactly how many companies are using or considering using MOOCs in their corporate universities. At this point, we can identify at least three main challenges to their adoption: Lack of knowledge about MOOCs. Many business leaders aren’t familiar enough with MOOCs and are wary of adopting a model that is largely untested. This is changing with time, as many companies are currently facing a widening skills gap, and therefore are becoming more willing to experiment with methods that hold promise as ways to train employees more quickly and more effectively. Limited availability of platforms. Until recently, companies didn’t have much choice when it came to MOOC platforms. Coursera and edX, the two major ones, targeted mainly academic institutions. Today, there are more platforms available, including mooc.org, which is a partnership between Google and edX to expand the edX platform to many types of organizations. Many traditional LMSs are also enhancing their systems to support MOOCs. Limited learner tracking. Learning in MOOCs takes many forms, from the traditional video-watching and assessment-taking to curating shared resources and interacting on social media. Big data is just starting to be incorporated into MOOCs in a meaningful way and new programs, like Tin Can (the Experience API), have huge potential for allowing organizations to track all of their employees’ learning activities. More and more, corporate universities are moving their programs online to benefit from the increased access, efficiency, and collaborative opportunities a virtual learning environment can provide. MOOCs are the next phase of that development, representing the possibility of providing engaging, effective training to all of a company’s employees, regardless of whether they are located around the globe. 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 MOOCs2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?Megatrends in MOOCs: #2 Facilitating Learning OrganizationsMegatrends in MOOCS: #5 Lifelong LearningMOOCs: From the Classroom to the Conference Room(Visited 164 times, 3 visits today)

The Internet has had profound impacts on education and training—not just on the practical aspects of how it is done, but on something much more fundamental: it has changed our core conceptions of what it means to teach and to learn. By far, one of the largest disruptive effects of MOOCs and other digital learning environments has been to move education out of classrooms and into the real world. When you can learn anytime, not just from 6 to 8 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays for example, learning becomes an integrated part of your life. Not something you do at a special time and in a special place, but something you can engage in wherever you are and, most importantly, whenever you need to. This new model of learning is turning out to have huge positive implications for organizations that are willing to embrace it. As we saw in the previous post on MOOCs in corporate universities, the ultimate goal of employee training and development isn’t just to help individual employees do their jobs better, but to help the organization as a whole achieve its strategic objectives. Today, with business moving and things changing so quickly, the only way for a company to even keep pace with the competition is by ensuring that its employees at all levels are constantly updating their knowledge and skills, challenging the status quo, and looking for new solutions to problems. In other words, it needs to be a learning organization. In 2012, Josh Bersin identified five key factors in building a learning organization. Although MOOCs as we know them today didn’t even exist when he wrote the article, the courses provide effective ways for companies to achieve all five factors. 1. Remember that corporate learning is "informal" and HR doesn’t own it. Training and development programs are often overly formalized, though business leaders, HR managers, trainers, and employees alike all know that the most effective learning takes place on the job, not in the classroom. Bersin writes: "Our research shows that companies which adopt ‘formalized informal learning’ programs (like coaching, on-demand training, and performance support tools) outperform those that focus on formal training by 3 to 1. In these companies, the corporate training team doesn’t just train people, it puts in place content and programs to help employees quickly learn on the job. This means developing training in small, easy-to-use chunks of content and making it easy to find as needed." These elements—on-demand training, performance support, on-the-job learning, bite-sized content—are some of the main advantages offered by MOOCs. 2. Promote and reward expertise. Workers are becoming more specialized, and learning organizations are those that recognize and reward the development of expertise. MOOCs offer opportunities for workers to enhance their skills and become increasingly specialized by providing flexible, engaging learning activities that employees can engage in on their own time, or even just while waiting for the elevator. 3. Unleash the power of experts. Too often in traditional instructor-led and computer-based training, subject matter experts are tapped to develop or vet content, but then their participation is over: the actual training is delivered by an instructor who may be an expert in training, but isn’t an authority on the particular topic. MOOCs allow employees throughout an organization to learn directly from experts in a couple of ways. First, the experts can actually teach the courses, or at least specific modules within a course. Second, they can participate in the social aspect of the course, by moderating discussion boards, hosting social media conversations, participating in Q&A sessions, and so on. Through networking in MOOCs, a company’s experts can actively contribute to its organizational knowledge base in a way not possible in traditional training. 4. Demonstrate the value of formal training. MOOCs won’t necessarily replace all of the formal training in an organization, but they can provide a platform to demonstrate its value. Bersin notes that those in leadership positions need to promote training opportunities and "help people make time to learn." In companies with a lot of formal training available, MOOCs can offer an opportunity for employees to try out courses and learning pathways before deciding whether they want to pursue them in earnest. 5. Allow people to make mistakes. Organizational learning can only take place when people make mistakes. That doesn’t mean getting multiple-choice questions wrong; it means making mistakes on meaningful assessments. By using real-world problems and facilitating the development of organizational learning networks, MOOCs provide an environment where people can fail safely and then have access to learning resources, including colleagues and experts, to learn from those failures. Challenges to MOOCs and learning organizations One of the main challenges of adopting a culture of organizational learning is the same as one of the main challenges to using MOOCs in corporate training: the willingness to give up control. In instructor-led and computer-based training, the trainers have complete control over what content is delivered and how. This is not entirely true in MOOCs—although the organization can control the content of the core resources, the real learning takes place in the networks and interactions among people. This can be difficult for some companies, but as Bersin’s research shows, businesses that are willing to take this path find themselves amply rewarded via improved organizational performance. To compete today, businesses need not just to provide training, but to adopt a new philosophy of learning. MOOCs can provide the technological and social framework to facilitate this transition and create a culture 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:Megatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate Universities13 Megatrends in MOOCsMegatrends in MOOCs: #4 Microlearning PathsMOOCs and Performance SupportMegatrends in MOOCs: #10 The Changing Role of the Instructor(Visited 112 times, 1 visits today)

Over the past several years, the educational requirements for jobs have been increasing. According to a study by Georgetown University, 63 percent of all jobs will require a bachelor’s degree by the year 2018. However, although students have been scrambling to get their degrees, employers are experiencing an unprecedented gap between the skills they need and the skills their employees have. In a survey conducted last year by Adecco, 92 percent of U.S. senior executives reported a workforce skills gap. The major areas of weakness were soft skills, technical skills, leadership, and computer skills, and these gaps are negatively impacting U.S. businesses, particularly in terms of their ability to obtain investment. The problem can be traced to inadequacies in traditional education as well as a lack of sufficient workforce training. Nearly 60 percent of survey respondents reported that U.S. colleges and universities are not adequately preparing students for the workforce, and although 89 percent believe corporate apprenticeships or training programs could be a solution, more than 4 in 10 said that cost was a major impediment to developing in-house training programs. The apparent disconnect between what students are learning in their degree programs and the skills that employers require has sparked interest in competency-based training programs, as well as digital learning environments like MOOCs that can greatly facilitate this training. Businesses need employees with skills, and they need them now. Why use competency-based training? The dominant model in education and training is based on the idea that learning is somehow related to how many hours someone spends in class. But this equation simply isn’t valid, especially in a work environment, where research has shown that because of inefficient, ineffective training people forget 90 percent of what they learn within a year. Competency-based training models unbundle the time spent learning from what is actually learned—if learners already have the knowledge and skills, they move on; if they need more time, they continue engaging with the material until they get it. The goal of competency-based training is learning mastery, not just getting your hours in. HR consultancy firm The Competency Group (TCG) describes competency-based training as "training designed to deliver performance." In this model, learners are assessed by their ability to apply what they learn in meaningful ways. TCG identifies the following four main advantages of competency-based training: It is cost-effective, goal-oriented, and productive. It targets specific training needs. It standardizes performance. It improves the quality of products and services. How can competency-based training be implemented in MOOCs? MOOCs can help companies address the skills gap, more quickly and effectively than traditional instructor-led training, and without them necessarily having to invest in full in-house program development. Here are a few models companies can adopt to use MOOCs for competency-based training: Verified certificate programs. All of the major MOOC providers have verified certificate programs. They also have multi-course sequences, for example Coursera’s Specializations, that culminate in a capstone project. Companies can award training credit to employees who earn verified certificates and complete the projects. The cost of this method ranges from about $40 for a single course to a couple of hundred dollars for a full course sequence. Direct assessment. Companies can recommend courses from the major MOOC providers or license courses from a third-party developer and then design their own competency-based assessments. This would still come at a fraction of the cost of developing in-house training programs. MOOC development. Using an LMS platforms, companies can develop their own competency-based MOOC training programs. These courses could take the form of full MOOCs or of individual learning modules. In all of these models, employees can take the courses on their own schedule and at their own pace, and then demonstrate their learning in a way determined by the organization. This minimizes the time they spend learning what they already know (which often constitutes a large part of instructor-led training), as well as provides opportunities for them to apply what they learn. Challenges to implementing competency-based training via MOOCs Currently, one main challenge to this model is how to credential learning in MOOCs. In traditional instructor-led and even computer-based training, the "credential" is based on attendance, not performance. In competency-based training, performance is everything. At present, there are two main methods of credentialing learning in MOOCs. One option is verified certificates, which are usually contingent on passing a proctored exam. The other major option, which is growing in popularity, is digital badges. Digital badges are microlearning credentials that unlike credits and degrees are directly tied to particular competencies. The biggest player in the digital badge arena is Mozilla Open Badges—using this open-source platform, organizations can develop and issue badges to individuals who have demonstrated specific skills or pieces of knowledge. Businesses are quickly learning the value of having credentials that reflect competencies rather than hours—last year the Mozilla Open Badges project grew from 50 participating organizations to 265 and the number of badges issued went from 50,000 to 235,100. A second big challenge is simply a lack of understanding about both MOOCs and the competency-based training model. Traditional training isn’t built around competencies, and although MOOCs are becoming more widely recognized, many organizations and trainers still look at them somewhat suspiciously. But with the widening skills gap, more companies are embracing alternative training models. Companies don’t need employees who have spent a certain number of hours daydreaming in a seminar or sitting in front of a computer terminal hitting the "Next" button. What they do need is employees who have mastered defined sets of knowledge and skills and are able to demonstrate that mastery on the job. MOOCs are digital learning environments where employees can learn, practice, and apply new knowledge and skills in ways that will have a positive, immediate impact on their job performance. This provides a powerful solution for firms to address their skills gap now, before they fall even further behind. 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:Megatrends in MOOCs: #11 Alternative Credentials13 Megatrends in MOOCs2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?MOOCs to Bridge the Workplace Skills GapMegatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate Universities(Visited 129 times, 1 visits today)

In the previous article, we explored how corporate training is moving away from seat-time and toward competencies. This larger picture here is not just a shift in how learning is measured, but an entire re-visioning of what effective training looks like. Standard models of training, whether they are instructor-led or computer-based, look like very much like college classes—employees are taken out of their normal work environments to spend four or eight or forty hours "learning" things they may or may not encounter in their day-to-day jobs, and likely won’t remember if they do. But standard models are quickly being swept out the door by training methods that take place not outside of the normal work environment, but right smack in the middle of it. This has resulted in a new interest in microlearning, which is essentially any type of learning done in very short bursts. Digital learning environments, like MOOCs, can provide frameworks for a wide variety of microlearning activities. What is microlearning and why should we use it Microlearning has become a bit of a buzzword lately in the training and development world, but it is one that is not well defined. The main reason for this is that microlearning is not one single thing. In the context of training, microlearning often refers to short (10 minutes or less) videos and tutorials, quick quizzes, and other features of standard courses, just compressed into a smaller package. But it is much more than that—every time employees refer to a job aid, Google the answer to a question, or ask a colleague for advice, they are doing self-directed microlearning. When we conceptualize microlearning in this way, we realize that much of workplace education takes place not in classes at all, but in the course of regular work activities. The question isn’t so much "Why should we use microlearning?" (employees are already using it—all of the time) as "Why should we formalize microlearning into training and development programs?" Here are several reasons this model of learning is becoming more widely accepted: It brings learning to employees while they are performing their daily activities, rather than requiring them to leave their work environments. This helps companies develop into learning organizations. Microlearning resources can be made available on-demand to facilitate just-in-time learning. Microlearning and mobile learning go hand in hand. People are using their mobile devices more and more in the workplace, for communication as well as for finding answers to questions. Knowledge is changing faster than ever before—a concept or process an employee learns today is likely to be obsolete a few months down the road. Microlearning allows employees to immediately access the knowledge they need, rather than having to wait until the next designated training day. In addition, training departments don’t have to redevelop full courses every time something changes; they can just release a new video or new performance support tool. Motivation is high. Microlearning is primarily a pull method: learners access the resources they need when the need them, rather than just acting as passive recipients of knowledge that they may or may not recognize as useful. Microlearning isn’t necessarily appropriate for all aspects of workplace education, but it is highly advantageous in environments in which people don’t have a lot of concentrated time to devote to their training, for process reinforcement, and for spaced repetition, among others. How do MOOCs facilitate microlearning? In a post last fall, I wrote that MOOCs have changed what learners expect from their educational experiences and that the technologies that support MOOCs can also support microlearning. Now, as MOOCs have expanded, in both size and format (i.e., MOOCs have evolved and now the acronym encompasses many different types of courses), they offer several options for training departments to implement microlearning paths within an organization. Here are some of them: Short videos and other learning resources. This is the most popular form of microlearning and the one featured in most MOOCs. Five- to ten-minute videos can be used for everything from explaining a concept to providing the answers to frequently asked questions, running short software tutorials, and introducing new products. Other microlearning resources, like job aids, documents, podcasts, and even short interactive elearning activities, can also be housed within a MOOC. Spaced repetition and practice activities. While learners are working their way through a MOOC, mini activities like assessment questions, short quizzes, and more can be delivered periodically to employees’ computers or mobile devices, enhancing learning through spaced repetition and practice. Communication and collaboration platforms. MOOCs can incorporate discussion boards, Q&A sessions, Twitter feeds, and other social media tools to provide opportunities for employees across organizations to communicate and collaborate. This helps employees expand their personal learning networks, giving them a broader range of experts to consult when necessary. Credentials and gamification. We’ll talk about this in a later post in this megatrends series, but microlearning presents an ideal environment for gamification. Employees in MOOCs can work to earn points and digital badges, and competition between individuals and teams can be used to foster motivation for training. There are many other ways microlearning paths can be formalized via MOOCs. The key considerations are that the learning activities should be short, available on-demand, and immediately relevant to a job task. Challenges to using MOOCs and microlearning in corporate training The biggest challenge to bringing MOOCs and microlearning together in corporate training and development is that this path requires a complete reimagining of what workplace learning looks like as well as some sophisticated technology to support it. However, both of these issues are quickly becoming moot. Companies are moving away from traditional models and more toward competency-based training and performance support, and learning management systems are evolving to better support both MOOCs and mobile learning. In a Corporate Learning Network post just last month, Chris Appleton described the advantages of adopting microlearning like this: "In a corporate setting, learning solutions must be dynamic, adaptable, scalable, and available on demand whenever and wherever they are needed. They must be surgically precise and cater to individual need no matter the function, background, and learning preference of the professional audience. Companies will often create large-scale programs for some of their most important initiatives….The investment of time and money to run these massive programs can become so unwieldy that they are no longer agile and able to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the business…Offering microlearning solutions may effectively eliminate these barriers while delivering the knowledge and skills needed for successful role performance." That last part is key: "delivering the knowledge and skills needed for successful role performance." This is, after all, the goal of all organizational training and development. Combining MOOCs with microlearning provides a powerful method for achieving this goal. 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:MOOCs and Microlearning13 Megatrends in MOOCsMOOCs and Performance SupportMegatrends in MOOCs: #3 Updating the Competency-Based…Megatrends in MOOCs: #13 MOOCs as Relationship Builders(Visited 135 times, 1 visits today)

When Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Coursera’s Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, and other education innovators decided to start putting courses from top universities online, for free, their idea was to make education accessible to everyone who wanted it, regardless of socioeconomic status, country, and other barriers to getting a traditional college education. What they may not have anticipated was that MOOCs would be such a huge hit with people who already had that traditional education—those already in the workforce who had gotten their degrees five, ten, or even twenty or more years earlier. But that’s exactly what has happened. MOOCs have spurred a major trend toward lifelong learning. Companies are now experimenting with ways to harness their employees’ desire to learn to help their organizations succeed. The lifelong learning trend There have been several studies of who takes MOOCs, mostly based on student surveys. The biggest one to date has been a University of Pennsylvania study released last fall that analyzed the demographics of MOOC students from 32 of the institution’s courses available on Coursera. What they found, which echoes other reports of this type, is that a typical MOOC student is older than traditional college age, already has at least a bachelor’s degree, and is already employed. Two of the most common reasons students give for taking MOOCs is to advance in their current career and to prepare to make a career change. In other words, people who already have a degree and are already in the workforce are taking charge of their own professional development and participating in courses on their own time and outside of their company’s training programs. This is a pretty major finding. Corporate training and development programs don’t usually inspire very much excitement, and these same people are probably daydreaming through their formal training and then forgetting everything immediately afterward. The MOOC data suggest that employees want to learn, not just to sleep through training seminars. They want to get better at their jobs and train for new ones—but traditional training and education programs just aren’t doing the trick. This trend toward lifelong learning is being driven on the student side by the same force behind the current push toward more training on the employer side: the skills gap. Both recent graduates and seasoned employees are realizing that in this time of incredibly fast change on nearly every front, the skills they learned even just a few years ago are now obsolete. In order to succeed in their current jobs, as well as be competitive in the future, learners are using MOOCs to update and enhance their professional skills. How companies can capitalize on this trend Companies can take advantage of the lifelong learning trend mainly by supporting and recognizing their employees’ learning initiatives. In a recent article for Entrepreneur, Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard identified several tactics businesses can use to create a culture of learning. Here is how these tactics can be used to support employee learning in MOOCs: Weekly lunch and learns. Once a week, buy lunch and have an employee present what he or she is learning in a MOOC. This can help spread knowledge and also create an environment where learning is seen as a priority. Training budgets and tuition reimbursement and recognition programs. MOOCs are free to take, but verified certificates cost anywhere between about $40 and $100. Reimburse your employees for these expenses—this practice will both encourage employees to take courses and demonstrate that you support their professional development. Plus, it is a lot cheaper than developing and running an in-house course! Set specific learning goals. Encourage employees to set learning goals every quarter and then check in with them on how they are doing. For example, managers can monitor their employees’ progress through MOOCs and provide support when necessary. Training departments can track learning efforts to identify and support organization-wide learning efforts. Distribute books to read. For MOOCs, this tactic can be changed to "vet and recommend courses." There are hundreds of MOOCs available—training departments can support employee learning efforts by vetting courses and making specific recommendations. Acknowledge the results. This is the big one—don’t let your employees’ training efforts go unnoticed. Treat MOOC accomplishments the way you would any other training program. Here’s another tactic Skonnard didn’t address: provide onsite support for MOOC students. If you recommend a course to your employees, organize group meeting, either in-person or online, where those who choose to take the course can connect. Companies can also benefit from the lifelong learning trend by offering their own MOOCs as ways to both identify potential future employees as well as build relationships with partners and customers. Challenges for MOOCs and lifelong learning in training environments The biggest challenge for organizations in incorporating MOOCs and the recognition of lifelong learning into their training as described in this article is the "not invented here" syndrome. Many companies (and many T&D departments) have a hard time accepting courses and materials developed by third parties; they want to retain strict control over employee development. But with how rapidly knowledge and technology are changing, and the huge increase in skills necessary for businesses just to keep up, this attitude is a dangerous one and will result in your company falling behind. You can always supplement MOOCs with your own in-house training and materials, but for many standard courses, it probably isn’t necessary. Work with your employees and provide the support they need to manage their own career development—the results you see will likely be better than any you could have predicted. MOOCs are challenging organizations to thinking about training differently. Realize that your employees are probably already taking them (or engaging in other self-directed professional development) and find ways to support those personal lifelong learning initiatives. Otherwise, you might find your employees taking their new knowledge and skills to a company that does provide such support and recognition. 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 MOOCsUsing MOOCs: Self-Directed Development and Workforce…Megatrends in MOOCs: #11 Alternative CredentialsMOOCs: Personal Initiative and Professional DevelopmentMegatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate Universities(Visited 238 times, 1 visits today)

If you were asked to name the top three current trends in business in general, my guess is that "social" would make the list. To say that social media has flipped the business world on its head isn’t an understatement—from product development to marketing to customer relations and beyond, tools like Facebook and Twitter have completely changed how companies function. But social media platforms are just technologies that have enabled a more fundamental transformation, and not just in business: today communication, collaboration, and social interaction take center stage in our lives, in our work, and in our learning. We’ve all heard that most of learning is informal, and much of informal learning is social (coaching/mentoring, talking in the break room, chatting online, etc.). Estimates about how much of workplace learning happens in this way range from 70 up to a whopping 95 percent. A 2010 survey by The CARA Group found that corporate leaders and trainers recognize the importance of informal learning and the role social media plays in it. They found that: 98 percent of corporate leaders and trainers agree that social media is changing how employees learn. 81 percent agree that social media is valuable for employee learning. 90 percent said they encourage or support informal learning. Digital learning environments like MOOCs can provide the best of both worlds—social learning tools integrated into formal learning programs. Here we’ll review the social development of MOOCs and look at some of the new platforms and models that are being tested to make the courses even more social and more collaborative. The social development of MOOCs One of the biggest criticisms of MOOCs over the past two years has been that they are not social. To hear the critics tell it, MOOC students are isolated learners who don’t interact with their instructors or other learners at all; thus, they miss the most important aspect of learning—that which comes from discussion, debate, and collaboration. This isn’t entirely false, but it isn’t entirely true either, so let’s take a moment to address this criticism. In their short history, MOOCs have already gone through a couple of iterations. The first MOOC was run in 2008 by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, and it was based on a connectivist model of learning. The goal of the course was not so much for students to master the content as it was for them to develop personal learning networks. To that end, Siemens and Downes provided a structure and learning resources, which were distributed across the web, but learners could engage with those resources and with one another, in any way they chose. This original vision for MOOCs less formal, but ultra-social. When Udacity, Coursera, and edX debuted, they provided a different type of MOOC—one that looked more like a traditional online course, just on a massive scale. These MOOCs highly were highly formal, but the social part was optional. The courses were housed within a learning management system and even though discussion boards were available, learners could, if they wanted to, complete them without ever interacting with the instructors or the other students. This is the model that critics claim doesn’t provide the social and collaborative learning opportunities that are necessary for meaningful learning. But MOOCs didn’t stop evolving there, and now practically all MOOC providers and instructors are experimenting with different ways to increase the socialness of MOOCs. Many MOOCs now have Facebook pages and Twitter conversations in addition to the standard discussion boards. Some educators are experimenting with ways to up the ante even more. The best current models seek to incorporate social and collaborative learning into a more structured, formal environment. They are going beyond just using discussion boards and social media to providing new tools and environments where learners can network and engage with one another in various ways. Here are some current initiatives: A HarvardX course on "Innovating in Health Care" is experimenting with a new way to match students for course projects. To improve opportunities for interaction and collaboration, this course is using Project Lever, which course instructor and application developer Regina Herzlinger described to Bloomberg Businessweek as a "sort of EHarmony for building businesses." Students in the course are using the application to divide into groups to write a business plan. Companies could use this model to match employees for project teams, even if those employees are located in different offices or countries. Professors at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Utah are currently running a joint collaborative online journalism course. Students at the two campuses are using the same learning resources, taking the courses together, and interacting with one another, but they also meet in groups on their respective campuses with individual instructors. Organizations spread across the country, or even across the globe, can use this model to provide training that is both standardized and personalized to meet learners’ needs. NovoEd is an entire MOOC platform built around the idea of collaborative, project-based learning. Assessments in these courses are all real-world projects that learners work on with groups made up of students from around the world. Businesses can use a platform like this to connect employees in both training programs and project teams. Challenges to implementing social MOOCs in organizations The technology to make MOOCs maximally social and collaborative is out there, and much of it is freely available. Thus, the biggest obstacle to organizations getting the most social bang for their buck is attitude. While most organizations have adopted social tools as an essential way to connect with customers, many are still wary of encouraging social media use among employees. But with the rise of the BYOD (bring your own device) culture, this obstacle is becoming less prohibitive. In many organizations, the training department may also need to adopt a different perspective. Rather than thinking of training as a process of delivering content, trainers need to switch gears to providing tools to support social learning among employees. MOOCs can be isolated learning experiences, but they certainly don’t have to be. Web 2.0 has, above all, revolutionized how we communicate, and MOOCs can capitalize on these same tools to massively boost workplace learning’s social and collaborative quotient. The tools are available and their impact on training can be significant. For more information, check out this article on how to use social media in a corporate classroom. 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 to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 1How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 1How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 2How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 2How to MOOC: Technology-Enabled Learning Tools, Part 2(Visited 90 times, 1 visits today)

As digital learning environments, MOOCs are incredibly flexible—they can be used for fully online courses, in hybrid courses, as supplementary materials, and more. One of the offshoots of the growth of MOOCs has been an interest in "flipped classes," which is commonly conceived as a reversal of in-class time and out-of-class time. For example, the typical formula for flipping a class is to assign video lectures as homework and use in-class time for collaborative activities including role play and problem-solving. Here, we’ll look briefly at how to use MOOCs to flip a corporate classroom in this way as well as explore a broader perspective on what it means to flip an online course. Flipping class time When people talk about "flipping" a classroom, what they are usually talking about is a way of integrating technology into a traditional course to make it a hybrid course. In this model, learners watch online videos at home and then come to class ready to participate in hands-on activities along with their fellow students. In essence, this method of flipping the classroom is just a way of reorganizing training to maximize face time and time spent on applied learning. In an article for the Association for Talent Development, Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams describe how flipped learning is being explored in businesses as diverse as the nuclear power industry to a hair-care products company. The MOOC format is a pretty obvious fit for this type of flipping. The MOOC itself can be used to deliver the content, and the learners can then meet in person to do applied activities, like simulations. In this model, the MOOC provides the framework for what is essentially a hybrid course. The main advantages of this "traditional" flipping (if we can call it that) include improved learning outcomes and less demand on trainers, who need to create and deliver the content only once (i.e., record a video lecture or tutorial, which can then be reused in future sessions of the course). This model has recently started to take off in workforce education as organizations look for new ways to provide the necessary training while making their training budgets stretch farther. But there is another vision of flipping—one that will become even more relevant as more classes move not just to a hybrid format, but fully online. Flipping class focus In article titled "Can you flip an online class?" Barbi Honeycutt and Sarah Glova suggest that flipping can successfully be used in an online course as well. They argue that flipping should not be just about time spent on different activities. They write: "The flipped classroom model can help us design more interactive and engaging online experiences, and online classes can help us expand on what it means to flip. Certainly there is something to learn by combining these two conversations." What they suggest is that flipping the entire focus of the course. For online courses, they define "flipping" as "shifting the focus from the instructor to the students." This way, rather than just focusing on what happens in versus out of class, "we focus on what are students doing to construct knowledge, connect with others, and engage in higher levels of critical thinking and analysis….The real flip is not about where activities take place—it’s about flipping the focus from you to your students." Their suggestions for how to do this include using a course-specific hashtag so learners can share resources and developing assignments that encourage self-reflection and analysis. MOOCs are also an ideal framework for this second type of flipping. In theory, any type of activity, assignment, or interaction possible in a traditional online course can be adapted into a MOOC. In addition, by using social networking sites and social media platforms, learners in a MOOC can build personal learning networks; create, curate, and share resources; and participate in reflective activities, such as blogging. This second perspective on flipping is broadly applicable to any training course, whether online or off, and represents a vast improvement over the "sage-on-the-stage" content-delivery model that gives corporate training its reputation of being impossible to stay awake for. Challenges to flipping a MOOC The biggest obstacle to flipping a MOOC depends on which type of flipping you are talking about. For the in-versus-out-of-class definition, the main challenge is getting learners to actually engage with the learning materials (i.e., watch the videos) on their own time. When Steven Blank experimented with using his Lean LaunchPad MOOC to flip a traditional course, he found that more than half of the students didn’t actually watch the videos at home. To increase engagement, he started tracking who was watching the videos and required his students to submit questions, which he used for a basis for class discussion. With the integration of big data into MOOCs, tracking what learners are doing is becoming standard. For the second type of flip, the main challenge is that for some training departments, focusing on the learners rather than the trainer is a pretty significant departure from normal. But, as for several of the trends we’ve explored in this series, ideas about what training is and what it should be are changing. Learners are demanding more engaging, active, and relevant learning experiences, and effective L&D departments need to adapt to these new demands. Flipping the classroom is associated with both better engagement and better learning outcomes, but just exchanging seat time for home time isn’t enough. The MOOC format, which is flexible and allows for both active learning and social/collaborative learning, can facilitate an even more profound switch so that the learners themselves become the focus of the training experience. 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:MOOCs: Flipping the Corporate Classroom13 Megatrends in MOOCsNew MOOC Environments: Distributed Open Collaborative…Megatrends in MOOCs: #6 More Social, More CollaborativeMOOCs and Performance Support(Visited 191 times, 1 visits today)