Organizations are now spending more on corporate training than they have in more than seven years. According to Bersin by Deloitte’s 2014 Corporate Learning Factbook, U.S. companies increased their spending on corporate training by 15% in 2013. Training is now a $70 billion industry in the United States and a $130 billion industry worldwide. This is surely a good sign for the economy, and for training professionals, but what does it mean for companies? Well, it doesn’t mean that all of these organizations are suddenly flush and have extra money to spend. Instead, organizations are facing serious skills gaps that are already threatening their bottom line and promising to have even more of an impact in the future. Employees require much more training than companies were previously providing, and it is taking a toll. So while businesses may have increased their L&D budgets by 15%, they are expecting a much greater increase in both the amount and the quality of the training provided. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) allow organizations to deliver that increased and high-quality training their employees need without necessitating even larger increases in the training budget. In fact, compared to instructor-led training and even traditional e-learning, MOOCs can even confer cost savings. Here are five ways MOOCs can save your organization time and money. Eliminating many travel, logistics, and resource-related expenses Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first. MOOCs eliminate the need for companies to spend any money at all on transportation, accommodations, meals, entertainment, or other items associated with travel. For a company that has locations spread across a wide geographical area, this factor alone can translate into significantly savings. Other logistical expenses MOOCs eliminate include costs associated with booking event space for seminars, providing transportation and meals for employees who attend training off-sites, and paying administrative staff to make all of the arrangements. Decreasing the marginal cost of training additional employees Once a MOOC is designed, developed, and put online, the course can be delivered to 10 or 1,000 or 10,000 employees. As long as your learning management system can handle unlimited learners, there is no marginal cost associated with training additional employees. If the MOOC is completely self-paced and independent, it can be run as many times as necessary. If it is moderated, there will be costs associated with instructor time, but those costs will by far undercut what it would cost to have the same instructor deliver the same training multiple times in person. Reducing training time Though training time isn’t always adequately accounted for in cost estimates, this is an area where MOOCs can have a major impact in reducing the unstated costs associated with employees not being at their desks. Moving from instructor-led training to e-learning can reduce training time by up to 60%, and though hard data are not yet available, MOOCs can lead to even more time savings. Not only are MOOCs more efficient than instructor-led training, but they can also save significant training time by being more personalized. In a traditional course, all employees must work through all of the material at the same pace. MOOCs, on the other hand, allow employees to customize their learning experiences—skipping the content they already know and focusing more on the gaps in their knowledge and skills. Just to illustrate how big this could potentially be, consider the example of McAfee, which used a MOOC model to revamp its new-hire orientation, a program that had previously involved 40 hours of pre-work, five days of on-site training, and post-work. Not only did the MOOC format allow McAfee to significantly cut the time required for its new-hire training, but its sales staff attribute $500,000 worth of sales per year to the skills they learned in the MOOC. Reducing the need for re-training The amount of information employees retain from traditional training sessions generally ranges from little to less. According to HR expert Ed Holton, retention rates for training range between 10 and 30%. That statistic is not only embarrassing, but it also means that organizations must spend additional money on retraining (thus more time employees spend away from their desks), not to mention the cost of employees forgetting key information. E-learning has been shown to increase information retention by up to 60% over instructor-led training. Again, MOOCs can improve on this number by providing a platform for just-in-time training and performance support. Your employees will never remember everything, but using MOOCs they can in essence take charge of their own retraining by the accessing learning resources and materials they need exactly when they need them. Keeping organizations current Here is another cost that is very difficult to measure, but nonetheless significant. How much does your organization lose by not being up-to-date in your industry? In a recent survey, 72% of companies said that e-learning helps them keep current and remain competitive. Using a MOOC platform along with the abundant technology-enabled learning tools available to create and distribute content, new information that comes out today can quite literally reach your entire organization tomorrow. MOOCs also allow employees to keep their skills up-to-date by providing ways for them to independently pursue their own professional development. U.S. companies are spending somewhere in the range of $1200 on training per employee per year. By adopting MOOCs for their L&D programs, organizations can ensure that more of that amount is going toward actually providing training for employees rather than to things like travel, renting spaces, and so on. In addition, the increased efficiency of MOOCs means employees can spend less time learning and more time on revenue-generating activities. Contact me for more information about how MOOCs can save your organization money while enhancing the quality of your training. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- 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?Corporate MOOCs: Getting Buy-In from Executives and ManagersShould your corporate training strategy move to the MOOC?Using MOOCs: Finding and Onboarding New EmployeesUsing MOOCs: Self-Directed Development and Workforce…(Visited 78 times, 1 visits today)

Digital learning environments, like e-learning, online training, and massive open online courses (MOOCs), have without a doubt been the biggest influencers on corporate training practice over the past several years. According to recent statistics, 80% of organizations offer online training and companies that have adopted e-learning have realized significant benefits, including 60% reduction in training time. But while traditional e-learning may offer improvements over instructor-led training, from a learner’s perspective, it still leaves much to be desired. As this Learn Dash infographic shows, e-learners become frustrated by many aspects of their courses, including: Finding lists of procedures and regulations tedious (76%) Getting bored with the courses (38%) Hating it when the pace is too fast or too slow (37%) In the previous post, we explored how MOOCs can improve on instructor-led training and traditional e-learning in terms of saving organizations both time and money. But of course the ultimate goal of training is have your employees learn something, which requires keeping them engaged. Here are nine reasons your existing e-learning courses are failing and how MOOCs can help. They’re boring. E-learning is attributed with being more engaging than listening to (or sleeping through) a lecture, but clicking "Next-Next-Next" on a PowerPoint presentation isn’t exactly a cognitive challenge. Gamification, simulations, interactive video, bite-sized content, interaction with fellow learners—these are just a couple of features of MOOCs that make them more engaging than traditional e-learning. They attempt to replicate instructor-led training courses. The absolutely worst approach to designing a digital course is to take the content from an instructor-led training course, put it online, and call it done. Many e-learning courses fail to take advantage of the huge potential benefits of online learning. In contrast, the best MOOCs incorporate a variety of technologies for content creation, curation, and distribution, as well as communication and collaboration, which greatly enhance the effectiveness of digital learning environments. They don’t allow learners to determine the pace or order of learning. One hand-me-down that e-learning inherited from instructor-led training is the idea that a certain course should take one or two or 40 hours to complete. Often, these time constraints are fairly strict, with little opportunity for learners to take control. However people learn at different paces, and employees in an organization all have different levels of knowledge going into the courses. The MOOC format allows employees to move fluidly throughout each course, spending more time on the content they need and skipping or testing out of what they already know. They aren’t interactive. Traditional e-learning provides one level of interaction, between the learner and the computer. But a wealth of data has shown the importance of learning through interaction with others (often referred to as social or informal learning). By using various social and communication platforms, MOOCs provide two additional levels of interaction: learner-instructor and learner-learner. They aren’t relevant. Both instructor-led training and traditional e-learning are primarily used to deliver just-in-case training. However, this is one of the main reasons corporate training is ineffective: it isn’t relevant to what employees are doing at the time. Relevance is a top motivator for learners, and the lack of relevance is one of the top causes of frustration. By using MOOCs to provide performance support and just-in-time training, L&D departments can ensure that training sessions are relevant and that information is more likely to be remembered. They don’t involve real-world problem-solving or decision-making. According to Learn Dash, more than half of e-learners want their training to involve real-life situations and decision-making scenarios. Unfortunately, too much e-learning still takes the form of a content dump rather than an environment where employees can practice new skills before applying them on the job. As flexible social learning environments, MOOCs provide opportunities for collaboration, project-based learning, and real-world problem-solving. They use summative rather than formative assessments. How many of your e-learning courses still consist of a PowerPoint deck followed by a multiple choice quiz? The first problem is that this is boring. The second problem is that this type of assessment doesn’t translate into or measure real learning. People who learn digitally prefer to be tested throughout a course rather than taking a single test at the end—learners find this more challenging and thus more engaging. MOOCs, which are based around the concept of bite-sized learning activities, allow for more frequent and more varied forms of assessment than are found in standard e-learning. They aren’t compatible with employees’ mobile devices. The BYOD (bring your own device) movement is on the upswing. Gartner predicts that by 2017, half of employers will no longer supply mobile devices for their employees at all—they will expect their employees to use their own. Mobile learning is one of this year’s hottest trends, and it is considered a key strategy for training members of the Millennial generation. Training courses that can’t be accessed via learners’ personal mobile devices are not only less useful for just-in-time learning, but they risk not being useful at all, because employees simply won’t access them. Many features of MOOCs are already mobile compatible (e.g., videos, social media streams), and educational technology companies are working to make all aspects of the courses available for mobile. Their analytics mean nothing. How do you track employees’ engagement in your e-learning courses? Similar to instructor-led training, which is often measured by seat time, e-learning analytics often focus entirely on completion rate. However, this statistic doesn’t mean very much, and research has shown that learners interact with online courses in sophisticated ways that completion rate alone can’t measure. MOOCs offer companies the opportunity to collect huge amounts of data, and to learn from data collected by others, to better assess and improve their training courses. These nine factors highlight why MOOCs are replacing both instructor-led training and standard e-learning in companies of all sizes, in many industries. Contact me for more information about how you can use MOOCs to up your firm’s training game. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- 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 MOOCsTraining Reboot: Assessing Your Company’s MOOC ReadinessHow MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILTMeasuring Success (ROI) of a Training MOOC, Part 2Beyond Cost-Savings: Advantages of MOOCs for Corporate…(Visited 352 times, 2 visits today)

For more than a year now, this blog has focused on massive open online courses (MOOCs). We’ve looked at what they are, the technologies that underlie them, and their place in organizational and employee learning and development. At this point, it feels like a good time to take a step back from the ROIs and the how-tos, and explore the top reason MOOCs are having such a huge impact on corporate training. MOOCs are not just fancy new technologies to attract and retain Millennials. Nor are they just more efficient methods for companies to save time and money while also delivering high-quality training. Over the past few years, especially as the skills gaps continue to widen and digital technologies pervade every aspect of our personal and professional lives, some of the fundamental ideas that have defined training for decades are shifting. Training is not only moving from in-person to online, but from just-in-case to just-in-time and from knowledge transfer to performance support. MOOCs have become popular largely because their flexible format allows companies to deliver the type of training required in the increasingly ad-hoc, BYOD environment that is the modern workplace. Training with a purpose The educational needs of students in a college classroom are different from the training needs of employees at a company, but for many years the two followed roughly the same model: learners would sit in a classroom and (supposedly) gain knowledge and skills that they would use at some undetermined point in the future. In workforce education, this model resulted in formats like extended new-hire orientation sessions, once-a-year training retreats, and half- or full-day seminars offered every so often. The problem with this model is that the training is often delivered without regard to employees’ actual needs. If we’ve learned anything at all about best practices over the years, it’s that training must be relevant. Just-in-case, in-advance training simply isn’t immediately relevant, so it really should come as no surprise that employees forget pretty close to all of it. With digital learning environments, training has become more ad hoc—delivered just-in-time and for a particular purpose. Although employees still need quality conceptual training, they also need access to knowledge and resources that they can use as performance support. The advantage of MOOCs is that they provide the best of both worlds. MOOCs are highly flexible learning environments that can be customized by both trainers and learners to meet the needs of the organization and the individuals within it. The combination of resources, including videos, tutorials, and simulations, and social forums, where learners can collaborate with subject matter experts and with one another, provides the opportunity for learners to gain conceptual knowledge and also to access performance support resources at the moment a problem presents itself. They provide learners with the training they need—where, when, and in the format they need it. Learning on the go The BYOD trend, which is continuing to rise dramatically, has largely been driven by employees—they want to use their personal laptops, smartphones, and tablets at work, and evidence suggests that they are doing it, regardless of whether their organization supports it. According to Adrian Drury of tech research firm Ovum, "Employees are finding ways to do it [use their own devices] whether IT knows about it or not. Really what we are seeing is enterprise multi-screening in exactly the same way as we see multi-screening in the home. We are seeing multi-screening in the workplace [because] people just want to use the right screen at the right time to get the job done." MOOCs that are responsive—i.e., they provide support for all operating systems and mobile platforms—make it possible for employees to use the "right screen at the right time," which might be their computer while at work, their smartphone while at a customer site, or their tablet while on the train home. BYOD mobile learning is really only starting to take off, but it is going to be big and companies that embrace it will reap vast rewards. According to a 2013 survey, 99% of mobile learners believed that the format enhanced their learning, and 100% said they would complete more training using this format. I challenge you to find any other training format that inspires that kind of optimism. MOOC providers and learning management system vendors are still working out how to make the courses 100% supported. Currently, although learners can do some things, like watch lectures and tune into social media chats, on their mobile devices, the ability to participate fully in a mobile MOOC is not yet available everywhere. However, just a few months ago, U.K. company Qualt launched the first mobile-only MOOC platform, and other organizations are rushing to follow suit. The corporate training landscape has fundamentally changed. New technologies, the skills gap, employees’ demands for more flexible training—these are all factors driving this evolution. Because of their flexibility and their customizability, MOOCs are uniquely positioned among training formats to meet the learning needs of the 21st century workforce. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:MOOCs and Performance SupportHow MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILT13 Megatrends in MOOCsMegatrends in MOOCs: #8 Mobile LearningMegatrends in MOOCs: #4 Microlearning Paths(Visited 152 times, 1 visits today)

How do your employees feel about your organization’s current training program? Are they getting the training they need? Do they find that training valuable? Engaging? Relevant? Does it help them do their jobs better? Corporate learners today need something different from their training than they did in the past. This article will focus on those needs and on how massive open online courses (MOOCs) can address them. More training There are no two ways about it: today’s employees need more training—both more than they have ever needed before and more than they are currently getting. This need takes a variety of forms: More new-hire training. A recent Accenture survey revealed that while 80% of 2014 graduates expected formal training at their first job, fewer than half of 2012 and 2013 graduates actually received any training at all. Companies, especially those facing a skills gap, need to provide more training to help new hires be successful on the job. More regular training. With the pace of technological change, the half-life of skills is getting shorter. In many cases, knowledge and skills acquired five or 10 years ago are now obsolete. This is especially true in tech industries, where skills that were in hot demand even a few months ago may already be in need of an update. Annual or biannual training isn’t sufficient to keep up with the pace of change. As management consultant Mark Lukens wrote for Fast Company, the traditional once-a-year approach to training often focuses more on filling gaps and fixing weaknesses rather than on developing strengths. It also encourages complacency. Lukens suggests that organizations should "change goals as they become redundant or something better shows up, not just because it’s January." More varied training. According to a new study by IBM, 80% of companies are now looking outside of their IT departments for ideas to bridge technical skills gaps. With boundaries between departments becoming blurrier, today’s employees need more well-rounded training options, including technical training outside of their areas of expertise and soft skills training to improve communication and collaboration. Innovation training. Innovation is the key to success in today’s competitive business landscape. Innovation expert Anthony Ferrier recommends training employees at all levels how to be innovative, not just to manage innovation. This training can result in benefits an improved bottom line and more empowered and engaged employees. MOOCs can help companies provide the increased training their employees require without significantly expanding their training staff. The courses can be offered to an unlimited number of learners, an unlimited number of times, whenever they are needed. In addition, there are already MOOCs available for topics such as innovation, which may represent new training areas for many firms. Efficiency, immediacy, and relevance Today’s corporate learners want training that meets their needs quickly, efficiently, and right at the moment those needs arise. These are ideas we’ve explored before. One of the biggest problems of both ILT and traditional e-learning is that the skills they teach are often not immediately applicable to the job, which results in inefficiencies due to forgetting and the need for retraining. MOOCs help companies deliver training that is efficient, timely, and most importantly relevant to learners’ needs. Mobility We’ve covered the trend toward mobile learning, but the idea of mobility goes beyond just being able to learn while sitting on the subway. Mobile users interact with technology in ways that are leading to a whole new style of learning. On Sh!ft’s eLearning blog, Karla Gutierrez highlights five "mobile usage habits of today’s corporate learner." Mobile users: Quickly move from one device to another, Are not willing to wait, Love to engage with online videos, Engage in short bursts of activity, and Are always switched on wherever they are. ILT doesn’t cater to any of these. Even traditional e-learning is limited to providing online videos in short burst of activity. Because of their flexibility, MOOCs are the only training format that can currently address all five of these learner habits. Social and experiential learning To say that social learning is the primary means by which employees learn is understating the fact…by a long shot. Social learning makes up such a huge portion of corporate training that in 2012 large companies tripled their spending on it, compared to two years earlier. This trend is only growing as informal social learning experiences, like peer learning and personal learning networks, are getting more attention. As MOOC technologies improve, the courses are becoming even more social, leading to increased opportunities for collaborative, project-based, experiential learning that echoes what employees are expected to do on the job. Training and development I alluded to this in the section on more training, but it is important enough to merit its own discussion. Today’s corporate learners require both training to meet their current needs and development to meet their needs (and the organization’s needs) in the future. Using MOOCs is likely the only way that many companies can even begin to provide this scope of training. Together, these learner needs are a tall order, especially as, as Marcia Conner puts it, "the L&D footprint continues to shrink," by which she means that the ratio of training staff to learners is declining. Meeting all of these needs via ILT or even traditional e-learning is beyond the ability of most, if not all, organizations. But it isn’t beyond the ability of MOOCs. In order to meet the growing needs of today’s corporate learners, it’s time for training departments to start thinking big. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- 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:Why Your Existing E-Learning is Failing, and How MOOCs Can…MOOCs at the 5 Moments of Learning NeedMegatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate UniversitiesMOOCs and Performance SupportHow MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILT(Visited 226 times, 1 visits today)

Your training programs need a reboot. You need to train more learners and get them up to speed faster, and you need to do it on what seems like an ever-tightening budget. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are potentially an excellent solution to help you meet your training goals. But is your company ready? Rolling out new training initiatives is always challenging, and it’s important to assess the climate in your organization to ensure it is up to the challenge. Below are several questions to ask yourself to help you decide whether your company is ready for a MOOC. Do you have a large number of employees who need to learn the same things? If your organization’s training needs can be satisfied by a series of one-time seminars each delivered to a different small group of people, a MOOC is probably not the best option. But, if you have a large number of geographically diverse learners who need consistent, standardized training, MOOCs can provide huge benefits. According to Bersin’s 2013 Corporate Learning Factbook, companies spend anywhere from $100 to $500 per employee per year teaching core business skills like basic management, office productivity, and Microsoft Office. MOOCs can teach these skills just as effectively and at a significantly reduced cost. Do all of your potential trainees have access to computers and/or mobile devices? MOOCs particularly excel at providing performance support and just-in-time training for learners on the go. Thus, a major assumption of the courses is that all learners will have access to them as needed. In many corporate environments, such as in the financial industry, this is a non-issue: a recent Forrester study found that 61% of information workers work outside of the office and most use at least three different devices every day. However, in environments like manufacturing, not all employees may have on-the-job access to devices. Problems with technology and not being able to use one’s device(s) of choice are two of the biggest sources of frustration with digital learning in general. In a MOOC, which may or may not be moderated, these issues can potentially be compounded. Are your employees willing and able to learn independently? MOOCs come in many varieties. They may be scheduled and closely moderated, or they may be self-paced and not moderated at all. In either case, they usually involve less instructor-student interaction than is present in most instructor-led trainings, and often less than is typical of traditional e-learning. For a MOOC to work, your employees need to be willing and able to learn on their own, which requires both motivation and effective time management. As a test, consider running a short introductory MOOC, or even just a single module, and soliciting feedback from learners before transferring your entire training program into a new format. Do you have a way to access or produce effective online learning content? The content for MOOCs can come from a variety of places, including (but certainly not limited to) open educational resources, vendors, and your own in-house training content. They key is that that content needs to be in a format that is conducive to being accessed online and from different devices. Video is the most common and most easily accessible content format for MOOCs. Do you have the technology and the technological expertise to support a MOOC? This question is a bit difficult to frame precisely because there is no one single MOOC technology. Many learning management systems (LMSs) now offer MOOC support, and if you are already using an online LMS, there may be no additional modules or know-how necessary to get your first MOOC up and running. On the other hand, MOOCs can be and are run outside of formal LMSs all of the time, and if you decide to purchase a MOOC from a third-party vendor, that vendor may bear the technology responsibility. The important thing is to ensure that you have the technology and expertise required to support the type of MOOC you want to run. Do you have protocols and systems in place to facilitate collaboration and communication? MOOCs can be siloed, but they are used to their best advantage when they enable collaboration and communication among learners. If you don’t already have methods and standards in place for cross-location and cross-departmental communication, now is the time. This is particularly important if you plan to use any social media tools, via either a local intranet or the wider Internet. Have you clearly defined the goals of the training and how employees will be assessed? The success of instructor-led training is often (albeit erroneously) assessed based on attendance; in traditional e-learning, basic measures include time on task and final test scores. Using activities like real-world problem solving, MOOCs have the potential to greatly increase the scope of course assessments, allowing success to be based on more relevant factors like improved productivity and increased sales. In order to get make sure the learners, trainers, and managers are all on the same page, the goals of the training and the metrics you will use to evaluate it should be articulated in advance. Do you have buy-in at all levels of your organization? If your responses to the previous seven questions were positive, then you are already in pretty good position, but a MOOC is an organizational endeavor and thus obtaining buy-in from all levels of the organization is key. For ideas on how to get to "yes," see my previous articles on getting buy-in from managers, executives, and employees. Hopefully you are able to answer most of these questions in the affirmative. If not, these questions can help you identify areas where you may need to put in some thought. Contact me for more information and strategies for how to boost your company’s MOOC readiness. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- 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:Strategies for Making the Transition from Instructor-Led…Corporate MOOCs: Getting Buy-In from EmployeesHow to MOOC: Designing Effective MOOC Training ProgramsWhy Your Existing E-Learning is Failing, and How MOOCs Can…ILT, Elearning, or MOOC? When to Use Common Training Formats(Visited 112 times, 1 visits today)

So, you have decided to replace, or at least supplement, some of your instructor-led training (ILT) with a massive open online course (MOOC). Great! You are about to join the myriad companies that have seen their training programs blossom through the incorporation of this new form of technology-enabled learning. Now what? Moving from traditional ILT to a MOOC is not as simple as just putting your current learning resources online. In fact, studies have shown that this approach is the exact opposite of what you want to do. The best MOOCs are designed as MOOCs from the ground up, from a digital perspective and taking full advantage of the available technologies. This article outlines an overall approach for making the transition from ILT to a MOOC. Plan, plan, and then plan some more Teaching a MOOC is much different from leading an in-person training course, and what all of the differences point to is the need for more advance planning than you’ve probably ever done before. You will be developing the entire course in advance for an audience with whom you may or may not interact on a personal level. This means you won’t be able to see the confused looks on learners’ faces when something is unclear, or be able to change things up quickly when you observe them nodding off. You will also be recording video, which is more difficult (and more expensive) to reshoot when you make a mistake than it is to correct an error or verbal flub during a face-to-face lecture. The more you plan, revise, and practice prior to actually pressing "Record," the better your course will be, and the fewer retakes will be necessary. Redesign course materials with learners’ needs in mind Today’s corporate learners are diverse group with diverse needs. They want training to be efficient, immediate, and relevant. They want to be able to access that learning on their own schedules and using their own devices. ILT is rarely designed with these needs in mind, but MOOCs need to be. Moving from ILT to a MOOC does not mean just splitting lectures you already have into bite-sized pieces. In fact, research has shown that this is the least effective way to convert a traditional class into a MOOC. Instead, take your course materials and focus on creating short, standalone lessons. This will give learners ultimate flexibility in when and how they access the resources. Another aspect of designing with learners’ needs in mind is thinking about navigation. In ILT you lead learners through the course materials in real time; in MOOCs you don’t have this opportunity, so you need to incorporate this guidance into the course itself. To help students work through the materials on their own, provide plenty of navigation signposts, along with a welcome page or orientation video explaining how everything will work. Create active assessments, and plenty of them One general feature of MOOCs is that they have more assessments than ILT or traditional elearning, and those assessments are more learner-centered. It is fairly standard, especially in corporate MOOCs, to have pre-knowledge assessments, individual video questions, module exams, and post-knowledge assessments. These assessments increase engagement and provide a way for learners to judge their progress long the way. MOOCs can also incorporate a variety of active assessments, from participating in course discussions to working on individual or collaborative projects. Maria Andersen, who works at Canvas and teaches a MOOC through the Canvas Network, recommends that assessments in MOOCs should "benefit the students not the instructor," which means that they should provide additional learning activities, not just serve as attendance markers, which is often the case in ILT. The assessments in MOOCs can be machine-graded, peer-graded, instructor-graded, or even ungraded. The important thing is that they are meaningful. Many of the assessments you use already can likely be adapted to the MOOC format fairly easily. Be prepared to play a different role One of the most difficult parts of transitioning from ILT to MOOCs as an instructor is getting used to the different role you will play. In a course that is not moderated, your role may be limited to creating the course materials. In a moderated course, you may answer questions on discussion forums and clarify concepts as needed. In either case, you will need to step back—likely more than you are used to—and allow the learners to engage with the course on their own. Learn from the data MOOCs have the ability to produce huge amounts of data, including how long learners spend with the materials and how actively they participate. This is an opportunity many ILT implementations don’t afford. Analyzing and using the data generated by your MOOC can help you both make the MOOC better for next time and improve your ILT courses. Don’t try to do it alone Transitioning from ILT to a MOOC is a huge endeavor, and not one you should attempt alone. In many companies, an ILT course might be developed and delivered by just one person, start to finish. MOOCs don’t work this way. The MOOC development team usually includes several members of the L&D team, a technical support team, and often an outside consultant specializing in MOOC design and pedagogy. Finally, what better way to learn about MOOCs and how to design and teach them effectively than by taking one yourself? Check out Coursera’s Learning to Teach Online for more strategies to help you make the move into a digital learning environment. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- 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:What a MOOC Is and What It Isn’tHow to MOOC: Designing Effective MOOC Training ProgramsWhat Style of MOOC is Right for You?Training Reboot: Assessing Your Company’s MOOC ReadinessNew MOOC Models: Blended Learning(Visited 201 times, 1 visits today)

From the outside, corporate training appears to be something of a paradox. On one hand, it is becoming ever more necessary for companies to provide training, especially for recent college graduates: according to a Gallup survey, only 11% of business leaders believe that college graduates are adequately prepared to succeed in the workplace. Corporate training is also a huge factor in company success—a 2000 analysis by Laurie J. Bassie found that investing $1,500 per employee per year leads to 24% higher profit margins and a more than 200% increase in revenue per employee. On the other, research suggests that as much as 90% of what is learned during training is lost in a short period of time. Given these data, it’s obvious that training is one of the key drivers for companies’ success. But the data also suggest that many organizations aren’t doing it as well as they could be, which means they are likely not achieving anywhere close to the level of success indicated in Bassie’s analysis. I’ve written before about various ways massive open online courses (MOOCs) can improve upon traditional training, for example by better meeting the needs of today’s corporate learners and by making elearning more interesting, more interactive, and more relevant. This article addresses three common problems found in training and discusses how MOOCs provide solutions to these problems. Problem 1: Employees aren’t engaged. Probably the number one thing keeping corporate training programs from producing results is that employees aren’t engaged. This can be the result of many different factors—learners might not find the information valuable or relevant, the training might be too advanced or too easy for the audience, or the seminar room simply might be too warm and the instructor’s voice too soothing. For whatever reason, although employees want more specialized job training, traditional programs just aren’t doing it for them. Too often, the blame is placed where it doesn’t belong, like on the subject matter. Take, for example, compliance training, which has a reputation for being particularly painful. However, it is essential that compliance training is done well, for legal reasons and because it is critical to business success. As Lorri Freifeld wrote last year in Training Magazine, "Among all of the issues the Learning function deals with, compliance is the one that can have the greatest consequences if it is mishandled." Perhaps the biggest contribution MOOCs can make to a corporate training program is to increase employee engagement, especially for the boring stuff. If you doubt the power of the MOOC format to make things interesting, consider the success of Jim Fowler, an assistant math professor at Ohio State University whose Calculus One MOOC has attracted more than 145,000 students. It is one of the top courses on Coursera and has been so successful that Coursera moved the course to an ongoing enrollment model so students don’t have to wait to get started. Calculus—the course that many people spend their student years actively trying to avoid! Millions of students have participated in MOOCs. Hundreds of thousands are probably participating in them right at this moment. Those kinds of numbers are a testament to the courses’ power of engagement. Problem 2: It is unclear if learning is actually taking place. Seat time is not a valid assessment of learning. Neither is the ability to hit "Next" on a PowerPoint slide nor learners’ reactions on a happy sheet. Despite the fact that these types of assessments don’t measure learning, they are the most frequently used methods of evaluation in many training programs. Inadequate assessments lead to third major issues. First, they don’t tell trainers what, if any, learning is actually taking place. Second, they don’t function as part of the learning process. Third, they don’t provide any motivation—a learner who knows that a happy sheet will serve as the course assessment probably won’t put as much effort into it as a learner who knows that the assessment will require a demonstration of skills and knowledge. MOOCs typically involve much more assessment than either ILT or elearning. Not only are there a higher quantity of assessments, but they are more diverse and more meaningful as learning activities. Assessments can include short quizzes, end-of-module exams, participation in course discussions, simulations, presentations, collaborative projects, and so on. The more creative, and the more realistic in terms of what learners will be expected to do on the job, the better. Problem 3: Employees quickly forget what they have learned. This scenario probably sounds familiar: You design and deliver what you feel is an excellent training course. Everyone does well on the final assessment, so you confidently report to management that your company’s employees are now fully trained in X, Y, and Z. But a few months later, when a situation requires that training arises, it’s like you never delivered the course at all. In a 2012 interview with The Wall Street Journal, corporate training expert Eduardo Salas said: "There are a number of myths that organizations have about training. The first myth is if you send an unskilled employee to training, when they come back there is immediately a changed, improved, skilled worker." One of the major implications of this myth, according to Salas, is that organizations don’t provide employees with enough opportunities to practice and apply the new skills they have acquired. The forgetting that happens following training is more than just an annoyance. It costs money, both in mistakes and in the necessity for retraining. It can also potentially lead to lost clients, a damaged corporate reputation, and other negative impacts that are difficult to pinpoint and measure. MOOCs extend the scope of training beyond what happens in the actual course. Learners can return to the material weeks or months later if they need a refresher. The most successful MOOCs also involve real-world situations, including simulations and assessments based on problem-solving, which provide learners opportunities to practice, over and over if necessary. Engagement, meaningful learning, and retention over time—these are three of the biggest challenges trainers face, and MOOCs provide powerful solutions for addressing all of them. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- 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: Meaningful Assessment Through Real-World…How to MOOC: Meaningful Assessment Through Real-World…Measuring Success (ROI) of a Training MOOC, Part 2Why Your Existing E-Learning is Failing, and How MOOCs Can…How Much Learning Really Occurs in MOOCs?(Visited 323 times, 1 visits today)

I’ve been writing about massive open online courses (MOOCs) fairly steadily for the past year and a half or so, and over that time, MOOCs have changed considerably from what they were when they first appeared on the scene. Largely, these changes have been due to more investment and research into the development of digital learning environments. Early MOOCs were often nothing more than long video lectures with a few multiple choice questions at the end—if you read much MOOC literature, you will know that these early implementations were roundly criticized for their poor pedagogy and almost complete lack of meaningful learning experiences. And the critics were right. However, that is no longer what MOOCs look like. As more institutions have experimented with them, and more research has been done about how to improve online learning, new pedagogical approaches and technologies have come on the scene. In terms of quality and learning, today’s MOOCs rival and sometimes even eclipse what is found in many instructor-led courses. This post examines a few of the innovative new technologies that are helping MOOCs evolve into powerful active, collaborative, and immersive learning experiences. (For a review of basic technology-enabled learning tools used in MOOCs, see here and here.) Enhanced content delivery: LectureScape Watching a long video lecture isn’t any more engaging than watching a long in-person lecture. There are certainly some advantages to video, for example, learners can pause, rewind, and return to the content as needed, even after the course is over. But MOOCs can do better. LectureScape is a new type of enhanced video player that was developed by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) based on an analysis of learning interactions from more than 7 million MOOC video sessions. Developer Juho Kim describes the technology like this: "LectureScape dynamically adapts to thousands of learners’ collective video watching patterns to make it easier to rewatch, skim, search, and review. By analyzing the viewing data as well as the content itself, LectureScape presents educational videos in a more lively and dynamic way." The video player accomplishes this goal via several features: A video timeline shows what parts of the video other users watch most frequently as well as a personal watching trace. Keyword search and an interactive transcript allow learners to quickly find information. Personal bookmarks allow learners to highlight spots in the video for later reference. Word clouds and summaries are automatically created, and popular content automatically appears on later slides for quick reference. LectureScape in essence transforms video-watching from a passive activity into a personalized, interactive learning experience. This is a great example of how MOOCs can improve upon traditional instructor-led training by taking advantage of the available technologies. More practical problem-solving experience: Simulations Although the idea of immersive learning via simulations has been around for decades, MOOCs have been instrumental in reviving interest in this type of approach. In education, remote laboratories are being constructed so students can perform chemistry, physics, and even biology experiments online—something that was never thought possible (or valuable) before. Corporate training has generally been more receptive to simulation-based learning, which has proven effective in fields from finance to healthcare. According to instructional design and development experts Peter Shea and J.M. Grenier, immersive learning environments have several advantages over many other learning environments. They can: Provide engaging learning challenges Provide rapid feedback Adapt to the needs of individual learners Be quickly developed and revised for new situations Provide real-time data about individual and group performance This is currently a very hot area, and we are likely to see a plethora of new tools and technologies supporting immersive learning come on the market very soon. Better communication, collaboration, and support: Project Lever, Teeays, and GroupMOOC Online learning no longer means learning in isolation. In fact, research has shown that one of the key drivers of MOOC success is the ability to connect with others. Several new technologies are taking aim at improving MOOC participants’ ability to communicate, collaborate, and get help and support. Project Lever matches students with advisors and is being used in MOOCs to match employees for project teams (learn more here). Teeays is a new service that provides on-demand TAs for online courses, giving MOOC learners access to timely in-person support. GroupMOOC is a mobile app that keeps learners on track and connected by automatically creating a course plan and allowing learners to network with friends and coworkers who are taking the same MOOCs. Although these tools were developed for the education space and primarily support courses from the major MOOC providers, they are excellent models for how companies can increase interaction in training MOOCs. For example, corporate MOOCs can take advantage of existing resources, like SharePoint and internal social networks, to enhance learner communication, collaboration, and support. Unlike face-to-face education, which has been working according to the same basic model for centuries, digital education is developing rapidly in response to current research, big data, and stakeholder requirements. The tools described here represent just a portion of the new tools that are either available or in development, and in the next few months and years, we can expect many more technologies targeted at further enhancing digital learning environments. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- 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:Video Production and Learner Engagement in MOOCsHow MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILTStrategies for Making the Transition from Instructor-Led…Why Your Existing E-Learning is Failing, and How MOOCs Can…What a MOOC Is and What It Isn’t(Visited 471 times, 1 visits today)

The idea that massive open online courses (MOOCs) can greatly enhance learner engagement and retention in corporate training settings has been a recurrent theme on this blog. (If your department is still using traditional instructor-led seminars for most of your training, well, you probably know that in some cases, there is no place to go but up.) Obviously, it isn’t just the mere use of technology that leads to increased engagement, but rather the fact that the MOOC format allows you to design training courses to better correspond with how people learn. One of the most significant advantages MOOCs have over ILT and traditional elearning is in how the content is delivered. Video is the primary means of content delivery in a MOOC. Because video plays such a central role, it has a huge impact on the learners’ experience. In terms of course design and development, video is the area where trainers may have the least experience, and it can also be the most expensive element to put together. For all of these reasons, it’s important to get video right. Fortunately, we don’t have to guess at how to do that. For a study released last spring, researchers at MIT analyzed about 7 million video sessions from four different edX MOOCs to see how various features of videos affect learner engagement. Here is what they found, along with practical recommendations that can be drawn from the data: Videos should be short. The optimum video length for learner engagement can be as short as six minutes. After nine minutes engagement starts to fall off, and after about 20 minutes learners have probably started surfing the Internet or playing games on their phone. Our internal experience is that video length is best using the "TED Talk" approach, ideally making them 18 minutes or so. Learners like a combination of talking head lecture and demonstration. There are two basic types of videos used in MOOCs: lectures and demonstrations. Within these larger categories are recordings of live classroom lectures, talking head-style videos, narrated PowerPoint presentations, screencasts (i.e., onscreen tutorials demonstrating how to use a piece of software), and Khan Academy-style videos in which instructors talk while writing and drawing on a tablet device. Learner engagement is highest for videos that combine approaches, for example, a talking head-style interspersed with PowerPoint slides. Most learners don’t like watching a video of a live classroom lecture at all. Learners prefer lectures with a more informal feel. This finding will probably come as a surprise: Learners engaged more with informal video lectures delivered by an instructor seated behind a desk than with videos produced in a multimillion dollar studio and featuring an instructor standing behind a podium. This pattern was especially apparent for longer videos, that is, those beyond 12 minutes. The researchers suggest that the more informal setting produced a "desirable trait [called] ‘personalization’—the student feeling that the video is being directed right at them, rather than at an unnamed crowd." There is likely both good news and bad news here for trainers. On the plus side, although MOOC videos should be of high quality, they don’t necessarily need to be produced in a professional recording studio. On the flip side, trainers who are accustomed to delivering traditional lectures may be less comfortable in a more informal setting. For demonstrations, digital tablet drawings are more engaging than PowerPoint slides. Learner engagement lasts one and a half to two times longer for demonstrations in which instructors talk while writing and drawing on a digital tablet than when they narrate static PowerPoint slides. This could be in part because human handwriting is more engaging than computer fonts, which is consistent with the idea that learners prefer informal lectures. It could also be that learners are more interested when something dynamic is happening on the screen. A little enthusiasm goes a long way. Lectures don’t need to be boring, and the best way for instructors to ensure that their students are engaged is to be engaged themselves. In general, learner engagement increases when instructors display energy and enthusiasm by speaking quickly. This is the opposite of what is recommended for in-person lectures, where speakers are often encouraged to slow down to allow for better comprehension. But remember: MOOC students can easily stop, rewind, and review if they miss something. Learners watch lectures only once, but return frequently to tutorials. On average, learners watch only two or three minutes of a tutorial, but they watch those two or three minutes multiple times. In contrast, they usually watch a lecture only once. Videos should be optimized depending on their type. Lectures should present the most important information clearly and in a way that is easy to understand the first time. Tutorials can be improved with tools like content tags and bookmarks that facilitate re-watching, for example, by using LectureScape, the enhanced video player I described in a previous article. What this all adds up to is probably a lot more than you are accustomed to thinking about when preparing traditional training courses, which explains why many companies are choosing to license third-party MOOCs rather than develop the courses themselves. For organizations that do decide to create their own MOOCs, these results demonstrate the importance of proper planning. Here is a quick guide to putting the recommendations from this research into action: Chunk your content into pieces as short as possible. Consider where and how you can interject slides and demonstrations into your lectures. Use live tablet drawings rather than static PowerPoint slides to illustrate key ideas. Provide learners with tools to review information. Invest post-production time to splice together different content types and edit out pauses and other things that slow the video down. Be excited about what you are teaching. You don’t need a full movie studio and video editing team to create great educational content, but as you can see, simply winging it won’t do either. Contact me for more tips and strategies for how to make your MOOC videos maximally engaging for your learners. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- 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: Technology-Enabled Learning Tools, Part 1MOOCs: Flipping the Corporate ClassroomNew Technologies Making MOOCs Even BetterMegatrends in MOOCs: #9 Flipping the MOOCHow MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILT(Visited 628 times, 2 visits today)

When does your organization provide training to employees, when it’s a good time for you or when it’s a good time for them? If you are stuck too firmly in the first category, it’s time to start inching over, and massive open online courses (MOOCs) are excellent tools to help you get there. In 2011, Bob Mosher and Conrad Gottfredson fundamentally changed many firms’ approach to training when they introduced the idea of five moments of learning need. Their model turns training from organization-centric to learner-centric, resulting in training that is more relevant to learners’ needs. The five moments of learning need are: New: When learning something for the first time More: When building upon what you’ve already learned Apply: When applying what you’ve learned Solve: When things go wrong or don’t work as intended Change: When learning a new way of doing something, which often requires unlearning and relearning Traditional formats too often approach all training in the same way, such as through instructor-led training (ILT) or elearning courses. However, when you think carefully about these five moments, it becomes obvious that learners’ needs are different at each. As such, they need to be approached differently. I agree with technology-based learning expert Eran Gal, who wrote at eLearning Industry: "…one of the [five moments of learning needs] model’s most brilliant points is its holistic approach to the various learning occurrences it identifies. As opposed to the declared aim of formal learning, which is specific learning achievements or certification, the goal of learning in the workplace is proficiency. In order to achieve proficiency,…one is required to combine formal, informal, social, and real-time learning strategies" [emphasis added]. As it happens, MOOCs are ideal tools for combining these various strategies. Let’s look briefly at how the MOOC format can address learners’ needs at each moment. New: When learning something for the first time Employees are frequently required to learn new things. Here, we’ll focus on two main training areas where first-time learning takes place: new hire orientation and when learning how to use a new software tool. In many organizations, new hire orientation is fairly standard across the board, or at least it contains standard components—policies and procedures, corporate culture, and company protocols, to name a few. This type of content can be quickly and easily delivered in a self-paced, non-moderated MOOC using short videos with embedded comprehension questions and an end-of-module exam. More tailored content, such as for managers, can then be delivered via a more advanced MOOC or in a short ILT session. Learning new software can be accomplished through video tutorials that are designed to be watched and re-watched as employees work through processes and examples. Read more about how learners interact with different types of videos in MOOCs. More: When building upon what you’ve already learned Many of the same ideas apply here as when learning something for the first time. MOOCs that build upon prior knowledge may include more advanced features, such as moderation, social and collaboration tools, and both more and more varied assessments. Apply: When applying what you’ve learned The moment of apply is where MOOCs really excel, in the form of providing just-in-time learning and performance support. Gottfredson and Mosher wrote in Learning Solutions Magazine, "[Apply] is the sweet spot of performance support. There is much that can and needs to occur here. And today we can do more than we have been able to do in the past. When people are at this moment, when they need to actually perform on the job, they need instant access to tools that intuitively help them do just that—perform." Because of its flexibility and its comprehensive nature, the MOOC framework is well-suited to provide performance support. Features such as course archives, video content, personal learning networks, resource sharing, and mobile learning together create a powerful performance support solutions that go way beyond the typical job aids. Solve: When things go wrong or don’t work as intended One of the main advantages of MOOCs over traditional training methods is their ability to incorporate real-world problem-solving, giving learners experience at the moment of solve in situations where the stakes are low. When things still go wrong, as they inevitably do, learners can use that experience combined with the same types of resources that are useful in the moment of apply (course archives, etc.). When solving problems, access to relevant documentation and the ability to communicate with knowledgeable others, via discussion boards and learning networks, becomes especially important. Change: When learning a new way of doing something Finally, things change, and in many industries today they change very fast. According to Gottfredson and Mosher, "This moment of need has been the least attended to, and yet is the most challenging. And since we don’t attend to it very well, it is often the most costly to organizations." The module-based approach of MOOCs can help companies meet learners’ needs at the critical moment of change. If new compliance training is required, a short course can be quickly created and instantly distributed to employees around the world. The same goes for when a new version of a software package comes out, or when a firm finds certain of its practices suddenly obsolete. MOOCs are designed in bite-sized chunks that can be replaced, updated, and moved around as necessary, and the ability to re-watch videos and access resources provides extra support for those who may take a little longer to "learn, unlearn, and relearn." MOOCs are not a panacea, but their module-based approach combined with their use of technology provides a tool training departments can use to meet learners’ needs at the crucial moments in a way that was not possible before. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:MOOCs and Performance SupportWhat Style of MOOC is Right for You?Megatrends in MOOCs: #4 Microlearning PathsTraining in an Ad-Hoc, BYOD EnvironmentStrategies for Making the Transition from Instructor-Led…(Visited 246 times, 1 visits today)