There are two trends occurring right now - one in business and one in education - that are majorly threatening their respective industries. In business a huge skills gap is hindering the ability of many organizations to achieve their goals because students are not graduating from school with the knowledge, skills, and abilities they need for critical jobs. In education massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are disrupting the traditional models and how people think about learning, delivery, and credentialing. However, out of disruption comes innovation, and if we can set these two trends on a collision course, we might find a perfect solution for the skills gap problem, which is predicted to take a heavy toll on U.S. and global businesses over the next several years. According to Bridging the Skills Gap, a 2012 report of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), a recent survey found that 84 percent of ASTD members saw a skills gap in their company. That is a huge number, and it is predicted to grow even bigger. In some industries the numbers are particularly grim. For example, according to the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), 93 percent of employers in IT businesses report a skills gap. Given the recent high levels of unemployment, the problem is not a lack of workers; the problem is that the available workers simply don’t have the skills companies are looking for. This is a problem across all industries, at all levels, with middle- and high-skills jobs showing the largest gaps. According to the ASTD member survey, the largest skills gaps are for leadership and executive skills, managerial and supervisory skills, and professional- or industry-specific skills. Management consulting firm McKinsey predicts that by 2020 the skills gap will result in 85 million unfilled medium- and high-skill jobs globally. The problem also extends to soft skills, such as communication, teamwork, and critical thinking. A 2010 survey by the American Management Association found that although 90 percent of executives recognized soft skills as important, fewer than half rated their employees as being above average on those skills. Why are employees falling behind organizations’ expectations? These are the top three reasons given in the ASTD survey: The skills in the workforce don’t fit with the company’s strategies, goals, markets, or business models. Companies lack bench strength for leadership positions. Less money is being spent on training and there is less support for employee L&D. Simply put, people entering the workforce don’t have the right skills and companies aren’t spending the money to teach them. As Peter Capelli, director of the Wharton School Center for Human Resources, wrote in Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs, "In short, a huge part of the so-called skills gap actually springs from weak employer efforts to promote international training for their current employees or future hires." So, what do we do about this problem? How do organizations ensure that their employees have the knowledge and skills to navigate the businesses successfully into the future? It’s time to bring in the MOOCs. Massive open online courses are quickly transforming higher education, but perhaps their real potential lies in workplace skills training. If part of the reason for the skills gap is that businesses are investing less in their training programs, then it’s time to make better training available for less money. MOOCs are comparatively low-cost ways to deliver top-quality workplace skills training to a large number of employees all at once. The advantages of using MOOCs for workplace skills training are numerous: There are many MOOC providers out there who already offer training for basic workplace skills. Using these courses as part of a training program would be one way for companies to train their employees essentially for free. For companies that want to develop their own MOOC, there are several learning management system platforms available either free or at a low cost. Although there may be a substantial initial outlay to develop a MOOC, the marginal cost of training additional employees approaches zero. MOOCs are easy to update so that additional training can be delivered quickly and as needed. This is especially important today, as with the rapid pace of technological advancements many skills simply don’t stay relevant for very long. And last but not least, people like them. People around the world are already signing up for MOOCs in droves. They are fun, effective ways to learn, and many people are now choosing to spend their free time doing something that used to be just a boring day at work.   Some organizations are already using MOOCs to address their own skill gaps. For example, 10gen, the company behind database tool MongoDB, has started offering MOOCs for developers and database administrators using the edX platform. They built the courses entirely from scratch using the "standard" MOOC tools including video lectures, quizzes, homework assignments, a final exam, and automatic grading. Overall the initial cost of the courses was around $250,000, but with the number of students who enrolled, the cost per student was less than $5. And of course, they can run the same course again and again, without incurring substantial additional costs. 10gen vice president Andrew Erlichson predicted that many companies would start running their own training MOOCs because they are cost effective and also open up new markets. MOOCs are also being used to teach critical thinking and real-world problem-solving skills, basic workplace competencies that seem to be running in short supply. Michael Lenox, of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, is currently offering a MOOC via Coursera called "Foundations of Business Strategy." Lenox invited small entrepreneurs and nonprofits to share their business challenges and get help from the more than 90,000 students who signed up for the course. This is not a test: these students are actually working on real problems facing businesses today. MOOCs have incredible potential in the workplace skills arena. Whether your employees need to learn digital literacy, project management, communication, leadership, critical thinking, or just about anything else, a MOOC can be a powerful, cost-effective, and ultimately very fun and engaging learning tool for your organization. Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management for executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson     Related Posts:MOOCs: Personal Initiative and Professional DevelopmentUsing MOOCs in Corporate Training ProgramsMOOCs: From the Classroom to the Conference RoomHow to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 1What Type of MOOC Is Right For You?(Visited 54 times, 1 visits today)

If you took a quick survey of your organization, chances are you would find several people who have taken, are taking, or are planning to take a MOOC. And of those people, a good portion of them are probably doing it to enhance their skill set and improve their career. Yes, you read that right - many people take MOOCs as courses for professional development, not because they are required to or are being paid to, but because they want to. MOOCs are still a very new phenomenon, and although a massive amount of data is being collected, it hasn’t yet been compiled and analyzed. However, preliminary demographic data show a pretty interesting trend. According to Inside Higher Ed, reports from early MOOCs offered by Coursera and Udacity suggest that between one-half and three-quarters of the students took the courses to enhance their skills either so they would perform better in their current job or so that they could find a better job. So while universities and governments are frantically trying to figure out exactly how MOOCs will affect higher education, and in particular whether they should translate into any sort of credit, MOOC students are leading a quiet revolution of their own - they are using the free online courses to increase their job skills and earning potential. The main question being asked these days, particularly in higher education circles, is "Will MOOCs be translated into meaningful credits?" But this is the wrong question, because we already know the answer: Yes. The American Council on Education has recommended some MOOCs for credit and is reviewing more, California is considering an initiative to allow students to receive credit for MOOCs, and many colleges and universities around the country are exploring ways to integrate MOOCs into their degree programs. So the real question is "How will MOOCs be translated into meaningful credits?" This is a question that companies can’t ignore, as it will affect both hiring and training practices in the very near future. As Chris Farrell wrote in Bloomberg Businessweek, "Look at any economic study on the future of the American corporation and you’ll find one clear message: Companies need educated workers. The business model of low-cost, high-quality education offered by the MOOCs could well transform corporate training and turn the idea of lifelong learning into reality. Let the revolution begin." So here is the situation: Your employees and colleagues are already taking MOOCs to enhance their job skills and soon the resumes that reach your HR department will feature MOOCs under the "Education" section. What does this training mean and how should it be recognized? The first point to make is that it should be recognized. According to a recent study by the Center for Management and Organization Effectiveness, the #4 reason people leave their jobs is lack of recognition. Recognition doesn’t always have to come in the form of a pay raise - intangible rewards are often more meaningful - but don’t lose top talent by failing to recognize your employees’ initiatives and achievements. The main model currently for assessing the knowledge and skills gained through MOOCs is provided by Excelsior College, a private institution that offers competency-based educational programs. They have developed tests that students can take to assess their knowledge and receive college credit, regardless of where the learning took place. Excelsior has identified several MOOCs that match their assessments so that students can take the courses and then pass the tests. This model focuses on the mastery of learning outcomes, not the method of content delivery. How can companies follow this model in their own L&D programs? Well, the beauty of MOOCs is that they are free and available for anyone to take. So, corporate trainers can identify relevant courses offered by different MOOC providers and vet them according to the needs of their organizations. Here are some questions to ask while evaluating MOOCs from an external provider: What knowledge and skills do you need your employees to acquire? What specific learning outcomes are you targeting? Like most classes, MOOCs have specific learning outcomes. Assess how well these outcomes match the needs of your organization. Does the MOOC focus primarily on theory or does it incorporate real-world applications? This is an important one - many academic courses are theory-based, which may not be appropriate for your organization. What kind of assessments does the MOOC use? Do the students have the opportunity to practice their skills? Some MOOCs still use primarily multiple-choice questions, but many now incorporate real-world problem-solving into their assignments and evaluations. What kind of certificate or other measurement of completion does the MOOC offer? The different MOOC providers offer different types of proof of completion. For example, Coursera students can earn a regular certificate or a certificate with distinction. Coursera also has a special Signature Track program, which provides identity verification for some courses. Many MOOCs on the Canvas Network involve creating an online portfolio or digital artifact. EdX and Udacity have both partnered with third-party organizations to provide opportunities for students to take proctored exams. As you evaluate courses, you will become more familiar with the types of courses that meet the training needs of your organization. Of course this solution is only temporary as MOOCs are still going through their growing pains. But change is happening very quickly, and MOOC training programs are on their way to not only being accepted but becoming the norm. This process has already started - just this month, both Coursera and edX announced new initiatives to move into the realm of continuing education by offering free or low-cost teacher training programs. Individual schools and districts will be able to evaluate whether or not Coursera’s courses meet their continuing education requirements, and the edX course will be eligible for Continuing Education Units through a national education association. As MOOCs progressively become more mainstream, more continuing education and professional development courses will be available and more companies will start to benefit from the awesome potential of this new innovation. As Chris Farrell wrote, "Let the revolution begin." Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management for executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. 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: From the Classroom to the Conference RoomWhat Type of MOOC Is Right For You?Using MOOCs in Corporate Training ProgramsMOOC: The King is Dead - Long Live the KingMOOCs to Bridge the Workplace Skills Gap(Visited 19 times, 1 visits today)

For the past year or so, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been busy upending all kinds of assumptions about education: content is king, quality education is expensive, and instructor-led training is the gold standard, to name just a few. But some subtler shifts are also taking place. One major change that MOOCs have greatly contributed to is the gaining recognition of learning as a primarily social activity, where the networks created are just as important (if not more important) as the content learned. The traditional practice of an instructor standing in front of a class of daydreaming students has been tossed out the window in favor of a new picture of an instructor as a facilitator who assists students to teach and learn from others and themselves. We live in a world where there is simply too much to learn - whether in a history class or a management training program, it has become nearly impossible for a person to absorb all there is to know. Because of this, education is moving from a model of knowledge transfer to a model of learning network development. MOOCs represent the intersection between these two models - knowledge can be transferred quickly and effectively to large numbers of people at the same time and spaces can be created for people to build their own learning networks. The implications of this shift for education are huge; the implications for corporate training and continuing and professional development are staggering. A personal learning network (PLN) is a network of resources including people (subject matter experts, coworkers, friends, mentors, etc.) and online resources (websites, wikis, blogs, discussion forums, Twitter feeds, etc.) that represents an individual’s learning community. Think of a PLN as LinkedIn for learning. PLNs are virtual spaces for people to connect, share ideas, and develop knowledge. Content literally moves from the person’s head, where it can become lost or muddled, to the network, where it is always available. When people with their own PLNs come together, they create learning communities or something similar to communities of practice, which Lave and Wenger (1991) defined as groups of people who share a craft or profession and who come together to teach and learn from each other. A PLN represents the pinnacle of informal learning. The power of informal learning has long been known in corporate training circles, but many organizations remain resistant to adopting it as a learning strategy. According to recent estimates, although about 80 percent of learning is thought to occur informally, companies still invest 75 percent of their L&D budgets in formal training. But the world is changing, and people’s expectations of learning are changing. It is time for corporate training to enter the world of Web 2.0. So where do MOOCs fit in and how can organizations use them to foster the development of learning networks? MOOCs incorporate networked learning methods into a traditional course structure. They are ways for employees, trainers, educators, and students to access virtual communities of practice. They represent the best of both worlds: formal training to deliver content to large numbers of employees quickly and efficiently and informal training via the development of PLNs. MOOCs offer opportunities for people to connect with colleagues and experts and to develop their own PLNs based around their professional needs and interests. These networks are unlimited by physical constraints - employees can connect with each other just as effectively whether they work in the same office, different offices, or different countries. They are also unlimited by time - even after the formal training program is finished, the network remains, expanding and morphing as the knowledge itself changes. This allows both the employees and the organization to benefit from the knowledge stored in the network long after the training is over. Since the network is constantly updated, it also helps employees keep their knowledge current and relevant. PLNs can even eliminate the need for additional training, for example, when new technologies come on the market, because knowledge can be easily distributed through networks. The benefits of PLNs and networked learning for organizations are many: It costs much less and takes much less time to distribute knowledge through network connections than to gather everyone together for training sessions. PLNs allow employees to share their knowledge and expertise with others, providing a way for organizations to effectively crowdsource parts of their training. PLNs create avenues for employees to obtain just-in-time training as they can access the network as needed. Employees have direct access to subject matter experts. Many people learn better from their peers than from instructors. PLNs can foster teamwork, cooperation, creativity, innovation, and problem-solving by opening access channels between different departments. The Millennial generation already spends a significant part of their lives on the Internet, which is really just one big learning network. Companies of all sizes can benefit not only from network connections within the organization but also from connections outside the organization. PLNs provide ways for learners to actively take control of their own learning, which has been shown to greatly increase the value of education and training. MOOCs offer many ways to create and foster PLNs in a training context. These tools can be easily integrated into most learning management systems and most can be hosted either on the Internet or on a private intranet. Discussion forums are places where people can exchange ideas, ask and answer questions, and connect with coworkers. Blogs provide opportunities for people to reflect on their training, develop and share ideas, and provide feedback on each others’ ideas. Collaborative documents, such as Google docs, can be used to work collaboratively on projects. Twitter discussions and hangouts can be used to host real-time conversations. Wikis can be created and edited as the collective knowledge in an organization changes and expands. PLNs are organic entities that respond to the needs of the learner. Companies can encourage employees to develop their own PLNs by using tools and technologies that allow their employees to connect with each other and creating virtual spaces for networks to grow. Professionals in several fields are already seeing the benefits of developing PLNs. Here is a short video on how educators can use PLNs to enhance their own professional development: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6WVEFE-oZA&feature=player_embedded   Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management for executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. 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 2How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 1How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 2MOOC: The King is Dead - Long Live the KingMOOCs - Helping organizations learn(Visited 36 times, 1 visits today)

This is your Brain on Games- The science behind gaming that proves gamification and simulation make sense Computer and video gaming… It’s a $25 billion dollar entertainment business per year which in 2010 sold over 257 million video and computer games. While the first commercial video game hit the market over 40 years ago, the game industry has grown immensely in the past two decades. There are casual gamers and then there are serious gamers…a ‘serious gamer’ may be defined as someone who spends 20 hours a week on gaming or alternatively as an MMO addict that spends his/her days in the basement clocking in 40 to 80 hours a week spent trying to master a game. However, most research exhibits gaming from 5 to 10 hours per week as healthy and otherwise defined as ‘gaming in moderation’. Computer and video games can actually be looked at as a form of ‘brain training’; it’s an intuitive way to learn things (and actually retain what is learned). When one is participating in a video type of game they enjoy intense determination, focus, a drive to achieve more, positive emotion… all of these are just a few ‘symptoms’ of gaming. Surprisingly, gamers are willing to fail 80 percent of the time. That’s a pretty high statistic compared to what people are willing do in daily life and how they feel they may fail. When you are immersed in a ‘game’ you amaze yourself at what you can accomplish. By participating in a state of play, it brings out our optimism and energy levels and actually has positive effects in a multitude of different ways. "The opposite of play isn’t work- it’s depression."- Jane McGonigal The use of brain imaging to measure the effectiveness of gaming has come into light of late and the field of neuroscience has recently introduced a number of new studies centered around games and their effect on the human brain. Stanford University has been on the forefront of this research, demonstrating that by passively watching someone play a game your brain is not stimulated nearly as much as when you are in control of playing the game firsthand. "Identifying a direct connection between the stimulation of neural circuits and game play is a key step in unlocking the potential for game-based tools to inspire positive behavior and improve health," Brian Knutson, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University. This is hard evidence that games won’t turn your brain into mush or you won’t turn into a zombie like your parents may have told you when spending infinite amounts of time in front of the video game controller or computer screen. The above images depict "Your Brain on Games" With the concept of gamification through simulation, you are motivated through play and rewarded for the choices made. When observed through a real-time functional MRI (fMRI) your brain activity of the hippocampus lights up and when this takes place we are much more likely to recall information presented both now and in the future. If the hippocampus is lit up, then the more likely it is that the behavior will continue afterwards and longer over an extended period of time. Casual gaming has also been shown to reduce clinical depression and anxiety in all ages. Some doctors are actually prescribing ‘video game therapy’ in lieu of prescription medication. Video and computer games are able to integrate with our personal lives in home and business; and are thus able to transfer over into better social skills. The myth that all games are bad for you has now been dispelled; rather they provide a wide range of benefits. One study showed that people who played an action-based game made decisions 25 percent faster than others, with no loss of accuracy. The University of Rochester Researchers have also found that an adept gamer can make choices (and act upon them) up to six times per second, which is four times faster than most people. Women now make up approximately 42 percent of computer and video game players; according to scientists those ladies that do play are better able to mentally manipulate 3D objects than those that have not played. The violent action games that often worry parents most actually have had the strongest benefits that affect the brain. "These are not the games you would think are mind-enhancing," said cognitive neuroscientist Daphne Bavelier, who studies the effect of action games at University of Rochester in New York and at Switzerland’s University of Geneva. There are also other confirmed influences from gaming as well. For instance, you may have heard that screen time playing games impairs your vision… Wrong! When in fact it actually improves your vision by 1) Giving you a better ability to read fine print and 2) Allows you to resolve different levels of gray at an enhanced rate. When we watch TV, sensory stimulation occurs. Whereas with game play, mesolimbic neural circuits are activated. Game play provokes both physiological and biochemical changes that are consistent with positive changes in anxiety and mood. These results are able to clearly demonstrate the intrinsic value of casual gaming in terms of significant positive effects on both depression and anxiety symptoms. The ability for gaming to replace standard therapy methods, such as prescribed medication is a powerful statement on the effects that games can make on someone (and all for the better too)! We have the ability to leverage the power of games to stimulate the brain. The name of the game is to play more, stimulate your brain and retain the information taught through gamified simulation training. Sure shooting zombies may be considered not all that stimulating for the brain in context, but in reality it really is stimulating. The media has put a negative spin on the fact that they believe video games are bad for you. I am here to prove to you that the media is wrong! Playing video games is actually good for your health (and your brain). Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management for executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. 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:Developing Skills through GamificationGamification Techniques Transferring Over into Real Life-…The History and Direction of GamificationGamified Applications for TrainingGamification with Narrative- The story behind the content…(Visited 44 times, 2 visits today)

The proliferation of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has prompted many discussions about what education is, what it means, and how best to deliver it in the current digital environment. While the debate continues on whether MOOCs will eventually lead to degrees, the knowledge gained from the first year and a half of these huge online experiments is changing the perceptions and practices of education both online and in the classroom. These lessons are especially valuable for corporate training and continuing professional development programs, which companies are rapidly moving online to lower costs and increase efficiency. Over a series of articles, we will explore what MOOCs have taught us about the best ways to design, deliver, assess, and recognize learning online. This first article highlights MOOC methods for delivering training content in a way that leads to real engagement and mastery, and ultimately to better job performance. MOOCs have focused the spotlight on how teachers teach and students learn, and many of the assumptions that form the foundations of education and training are being challenged. The first idol to fall has been the lecture. Lectures have been staples practically since the beginning of training programs. The problem is that unless the goal is to put people to sleep, lectures just don’t work. Studies going back to the 1970s have shown that people simply can’t pay attention and retain information over long periods of time. In fact, most people can pay attention for only very short periods of time and then they need to use the information somehow or it will vanish from their working memory. This is because the brain’s working memory capacity is limited - if we don’t apply information immediately to consolidate it into long-term memory, it will disappear to make room for new information. The attention and memory problems are solved in MOOCs by doing away with the long lecture altogether in favor of a brain-friendly method of delivery called "bite-sized learning." Bite-sized learning (or as elearning expert Susan Smith Nash calls it, "snack" learning) involves dividing course material into very small chunks, interspersed with activities such as short quizzes, mini-research projects, or questions for reflection and discussion. These small chunks make it easier for learners to absorb information and give them the opportunity to reflect on it and consolidate it into memory before moving onto the next chunk. In MOOCs, content delivery can take many forms, including videos, documents, slide shows, audio podcasts, whiteboard animations, and even live virtual webinars with real-time commenting and participation. When designing these learning resources, think about how to divide the course content into chunks of no more than 10 minutes, with an activity at the end that either tests declarative knowledge or provides the opportunity to apply practical knowledge. Rich multimedia content is much more engaging than just text, and even videos can be interactive, for example, with quiz questions and reflection prompts inserted at various points. Ideally, the chunks should contain three main elements - content, activity, and review - so that each mini module is a complete learning experience. Bite-sized course materials are not only brain-friendly, but they are also much more suited than standard lectures to the needs of today’s learners. One of the major advantages of MOOCs is that they allow learners to be mobile. Few people who are not full-time students have the time to devote hours every night to coursework. This is actually a good thing - our brains can’t absorb hours of coursework at a time anyway! MOOCs allow people to access their course materials on the go. For businesses, this convenience can represent huge savings in terms of both time and cost. Rather than spending a whole day in a seminar learning very little, employees can access training materials in their downtime. Organizing material into small chunks allows people the freedom to learn how and when they want to, as well as increases training efficiency - using bite-sized, mobile elearning, your employees could learn more in the 10 minutes it takes for a seminar to get started than in the entire rest of a standard training day. In a recent blog on the Lectora site, elearning and social media expert Kristen Marshall identified 10 components of online courses that can easily be presented in bite-sized chunks: Videos Podcasts and screencasts Group discussions Games Quizzes Infographics Outside resources (i.e., articles, blogs, forums) Questions for exploration Real-world examples Avatars The formats of many of these components, such as podcasts and infographics, were developed for online consumption in the first place, meaning that they are designed to present complete ideas in small pieces that are easy to digest (and in the case of infographics, easy to visualize). On her Elearning Queen blog, Susan Smith Nash offers some excellent suggestions for engaging workplace learners in bite-sized learning. First, she suggests telling learners in advance that the lessons will be short and sweet, such as by naming them "Lunch and Learn," or "Breaktime Learning." This will discourage learners from procrastination by letting them know that they can complete a full lesson in a short period of time. She also emphasizes that the learning must be "pain-free" so as not to lead to performance anxiety. Strategies for relaxed learning include using an intuitive user interface and allowing a limited number of choices. Finally, Nash stresses the importance of using multimedia to engage and keep the learners’ interest as well as ensuring that the content works on computers as well as mobile devices. The real disruptive power of MOOCs has yet to be realized, but at the very least they have led instructors to think differently about the goals and processes of education. Bite-sized learning is one of the few MOOC elements that most people agree on - this form of content delivery allows learners to engage with course materials in ways that lead to real understanding and mastery, rather than just seat time. In the next article in this series, we will examine the issues surrounding using MOOC social media tools in training. Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management for executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. 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 Bryant writes for the training blog: www.YourTrainingEdge.com   Related Posts:How to MOOC: Technology-Enabled Learning Tools, Part 1Beyond Cost-Savings: Advantages of MOOCs for Corporate…Rapid Elearning and MOOCs: Keeping Up with ChangeNew MOOC Models: Blended LearningWhat Type of MOOC Is Right For You?(Visited 29 times, 1 visits today)

Tyler Cown, a professor of economics at George Mason University, wrote a New York Times article, with the same title as this post (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/business/a-dearth-of-investment-in-young-workers.html?_r=0).  What  is troubling is his argument that due to a slow economic recovery, that much of our nations youth are being bypassed.  Suggesting that these workers will not attain the economic status of their parents or achieve the desire of being middle-class. Mr. Cown’s article makes the following points: Businesses have been and are expected to continue to be unwilling to invest in teaching skills to their new staff. That these same businesses are investing in information technologies that eliminates dependency on staff, and, Staff can expect to have more of their training and education delivered to them online. The article is a bit sobering and does not point to a rosy outlook.  Reading is does, however, provide opportunities for companies who wish to take an alternative path to success.  It also creates opportunities for firms delivering affordable solutions to these companies to provide the training that they remain willing to deliver. Related Posts:Rackspace Solves its Recruitment ProblemsHow to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 1How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 1MOOCs to Bridge the Workplace Skills GapUniversity Trading Challenge December 9, 2011(Visited 10 times, 1 visits today)

Wharton’s announcement that it was working with Coursera to put its first-year MBA programs online for Free.  While this does not provide the participant student with the same benefits of going to Wharton with its two-year immersion in a community of scholars, or access to its famed relationships with employers, it does create an opportunity for many to receive the same ‘high-quality’ training from their professors. They have even provided an opportunity to receive a certificate of completion for $49 to those who pass those initial classes. To date, about 700,000 students in 173 countries have already enrolled in Wharton MOOCs, more than the combined enrollment in Wharton’s traditional MBA and undergraduate programs since the school’s founding in 1881. You can read the entire article here at: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-13/wharton-puts-first-year-mba-courses-online-for-free#r=read Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:How MOOCs Are Used in Workplace TrainingMOOCs: Personal Initiative and Professional DevelopmentWhat Determines Value in Training?MOOCs: From the Classroom to the Conference RoomMOOCs to Bridge the Workplace Skills Gap(Visited 182 times, 1 visits today)

I have said before that the real innovation of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is not technological (after all, we already had online videos, forums, and blogs), but pedagogical - the idea that content is king has been steamrolled by the Internet and the spread of open educational resources. MOOCs have challenged the dominant thinking about how people learn. And guess what? Sitting in a room and listening to someone talk for an hour or three isn’t it - mere exposure to content does not equal learning. People learn by engaging with content, participating in hands-on activities, and teaching and learning from their peers. So why does so much of corporate training still involve an instructor flipping through a seemingly endless PowerPoint slide deck? The MOOC model involves students watching short videos for content and then performing active learning activities, such as participating in discussions, working through simulations, collaborating on projects, and writing and peer-reviewing essays. The content delivery portion of a MOOC is typically short, with each video lasting no more than 10 to 12 minutes, while the real emphasis is on applying the newly acquired knowledge and skills and connecting and collaborating with others. Content, which thanks to Google is always at our fingertips, takes a backseat to building personal knowledge networks and solving real-world problems. It is perhaps no coincidence that the MOOC explosion has occurred side-by-side with a rise in popularity of the "flipped classroom" model, in which the traditional method of classroom delivery is flipped on its head. In a traditional classroom, the instructor lectures during class time and then sends the students home with homework. In a flipped classroom, the students watch pre-recorded video lectures in advance and then use class time to do activities like research projects, group work, and so on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=r2b7GeuqkPc The flipped classroom model is not particularly new - it has its roots in the early 1990s and a version of it has been used in higher-level college seminars for years. But the idea of flipping K-12 and lower-level college classrooms has only recently taken off, and although there has been a lot of speculation about flipping the corporate classroom, trainers seem reticent to adopt the trend. However, the Millennials and future digital native generations entering the workforce will require more active engagement than listening to dull PowerPoint lectures. As George Bradt wrote in a Forbes article advocating flipping business presentations: "When Generation Z - the Internet generation - enters the workforce, their expectations for business presentations will be drastically different from those today. If you don’t change with them, no one is going to pay attention to you anymore." So what are the advantages of flipping the corporate classroom and how can you use MOOCs to do it? When you flip a classroom, the instructor moves (in popular jargon) from being a "sage on the stage" to being "a guide on the side." The training becomes participant-focused rather than either instructor- or content-focused. The benefit of this switch is clear: people who actively participate in their own education learn better than people who don’t. Flipped classrooms, like MOOCs, also have the potential to confer huge cost savings - rather than paying trainers to deliver the same presentation to multiple groups, the presentation needs to be recorded only once. Barbi Honeycutt, the founder of Flip It Consulting, recommends that trainers "start with the question, ‘What are the participants going to do during the training program?’ The emphasis is on the word ‘during’ because flipped training programs emphasize the application, analysis, and evaluation of the material during the learning experience, not afterwards." For example, one frequent training need is learning how to use a new software package. Often, an instructor will deliver a tutorial in person and then the employees will be sent back to their desks to perform tasks using the software. In a flipped setting, the employees would watch video tutorials in advance and then come together to work through the tasks. This format allows learners to take as much time as they need with the material, rewinding and replaying the tutorials as necessary, and to ask questions and receive support while they are actually working with the software package. Honeycutt recommends that trainers start with figuring out the goal of the training - what the employees need to be able to do - and then "design [an] environment to allow time and space for participants to actually do it." This idea may sound radical, but it really shouldn’t - training is unique in that it is the only type of education where the emphasis is almost entirely on building skills and competencies. Because organizations need to train their employees quickly and have those employees be able to apply the training immediately, it only makes sense that training sessions focus on practical applications and real-world problem solving. Flipped classrooms also give employees opportunities to interact with subject matter experts in ways that might not normally be available. Although MOOCs are not inherently flipped (in fact, many merely replicate the "sage on the stage" model), they do provide an excellent framework for flipping. Any type of training that relies on lectures can be flipped, and there are already examples of MOOCs being used to flip classrooms in higher education. For example, MOOC provider edX has teamed up with two community colleges in the Boston area to offer computer courses that are not usually available at the schools. Students access the edX lectures and other online resources from home and then work on projects in class. MOOCs offer many flipping options for corporate trainers. They can be used in blended programs, like the edX/community college partnership. But with the availability of myriad technology-enabled social learning tools, like applications for collaborative documents, shared work spaces, and virtual meetings, the entire flipped classroom experience can be emulated within the MOOC itself. Flipped classrooms and MOOCs are just starting to come together, but they have the potential to be as powerful for training and professional development as they are in education. Start thinking now about how your organization can flip a whole training program, or even just a class. As the creators of the following video suggest, flipping is the vehicle to the future. Don’t be left behind. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpHfTO8SW7U Related Posts:Using MOOCs in Corporate Training ProgramsNew MOOC Models: Blended LearningHow to MOOC: Technology-Enabled Learning Tools, Part 1New MOOC Environments: Distributed Open Collaborative…How to MOOC: Designing Effective MOOC Training Programs(Visited 1 times, 1 visits today)

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a bit of a chimera - they have the head of instructor-led training, the body of traditional e-learning, and the long tail of social media. They also take advantage of many technology-enabled learning tools and platforms. Just as there are myriad types of brick-and-mortar courses, there are many types of MOOCs, each of which has its own goals and implementations. How do we design effective training programs for such an eclectic creature? In a presentation given at the 2013 Sloan-C conference, Jason Mock, instructional designer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, noted that MOOCs do not require completely new models of instructional design, but that problems in MOOCs are by nature much, much bigger than problems in traditional courses. Because of this, sound instructional design is even more essential for MOOCs than for other types of programs. So what are some main issues corporate trainers need to consider when designing a MOOC? Audience, Purpose, and Content All instructional design starts with assessing the needs of the audience and the scope and purpose of the training. Start by asking standard questions for training development, including: "Who will take the training?," "How much content needs to be delivered?," and "How complex is the information?" MOOCs require additional questions, such as: "Are the participants located in the same region/time zone or distributed around the country or the world?," "Do employees have adequate access to the Internet via computers and mobile devices?," and "Do employees have the necessary technological skills to complete the course?" The content of the training determines whether a MOOC is the right format in the first place and, if so, what type of MOOC to use. A MOOC is probably not the best choice to disseminate one-off information to a relatively small group of people, like new product sales specs (though you could certainly use some MOOC elements, like a live webinar coupled with a virtual discussion space). The power of the MOOC is in delivering training to large groups of people altogether, rather than repeating it to small groups. MOOCs are well suited to both hard skills and soft skills training, but the type of course may differ. For example, hard skills like typing, using spreadsheets, and data analysis may call for a course with extensive video tutorials, exercises, and quantitative practical assessments. On the other hand, courses for soft skills, such as conflict management, communication, and leadership, may take more advantage of social learning tools, incorporating role playing and collaborative assignments. Ultimately, the MOOC you use will depend on the audience, content, budget, and other factors - the main point is that this format is fully customizable for the organization’s needs. Structure and Navigation MOOCs are usually organized into modules, which in higher education generally correspond to weeks. The structure depends on how well the information can be chunked into small learning objects, but typical courses run anywhere from four to twelve weeks, with each week following the same basic structure. A standard week’s activities may include video lectures and/or readings, interaction on discussion forums or other social media platforms, individual knowledge assessments, and group collaborative work. Ideally each week’s content should also include a review of information from the previous weeks. As Bill Cushard over at Mindflash points out, MOOCs (unlike training seminars) are perfect for exploiting the "spacing effect," in which people learn better when content is repeated over a long time rather than crammed into a short time. Course navigation is perhaps the most essential design consideration, and confusing course navigation causes by far the most frustration for learners. The course structure, and the way learners should navigate through it, must be not only clear, but absolutely, unmistakably clear. Using a module-based design with each week following a similar structure can go a long way toward helping learners navigate through a course. It is also helpful to have a separate document, easily accessible from the main course page, that clearly lays out the objectives, activities, and expectations for each module. Assessment and Feedback The biggest debates around MOOCs in higher education revolve around the issue of assessment. Corporate training largely escapes much of the controversy because the outcomes of the training are more readily measured: Can employees apply the newly learned concepts and skills on the job? Assessments in MOOCs can take many forms, including knowledge assessments (e.g., multiple choice quizzes), practical projects (e.g., data analysis, business writing), and getting feedback from fellow learners (e.g., on presentation skills, public speaking, etc.). The best assessments are directly relevant to employees’ needs - adult learners vastly prefer just-in-time training to just-in-case training - so assignments and projects should give learners the opportunity to apply what they learn each week. Facilitation and Support Most MOOCs are facilitated by at least one instructor and a couple of teaching assistants (TAs). The facilitators send announcements, answer questions, and monitor the discussion boards for high-interest topics and recurring technical problems. This facilitation is essential both to help learners keep on task and to enhance the feeling of an individualized learning experience, even in a class of thousands. Of course, in a class of thousands, the instructors rarely have the opportunity to interact individually with students, so an additional level of support is needed. Results from a study of MIT’s first MOOC showed that the strongest predictor of students’ success was whether or not they worked offline with someone else on the material. It didn’t matter whether that someone else was a subject matter expert or a fellow student - the important thing was some form of in-person support. Coursera has recently launched a program to provide more learning support (though it is still delivered online) - professors teaching a MOOC for a second or third time are encouraged to review the discussion boards from earlier implementations and identify the students who were the most active and the most helpful. These students are invited back to the course as "community TAs." Corporate training programs offer may options for learner support, including recruiting community TAs and organizing learners into offline groups based on department or physical location. Not only will learning be more effective, but these groups will foster teamwork and cooperation. As you can see, the design considerations for MOOCs are not inherently different from those for traditional e-learning or even instructor-led training. But because the courses themselves are massive, the effects of even small problems can become greatly amplified. Careful planning and sound course design are the fundamental ingredients of MOOC success. Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:How to MOOC: Meaningful Assessment Through Real-World…What Type of MOOC Is Right For You?By the Numbers: Learning from MOOCsHow to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 2New MOOC Models: Blended Learning(Visited 8 times, 1 visits today)

If there’s one thing we have learned from the rapid changes in education and training over the past year it is that there is more than one way to do things, even in education. New technologies emerge, they disrupt the status quo, and then, inevitably, they change. This is exactly what has happened with massive open online courses (MOOCs). Contrary to what many people predicted, MOOCs were not a "one and done"—they have continued to expand and gain credibility, and now you can get a massive online master’s degree in computer science from Georgia Tech. And contrary to what many feared, MOOCs have not yet replaced traditional colleges and training programs (at least the last time I checked all of our country’s higher education institutions were still standing). What MOOCs have done and will continue to do is change how education is delivered, both online and in the classroom. They have broadened the scope of what people expect from courses and from technology-enabled learning tools. Over a short series of articles, we will look at some new ways MOOCs are being used and how these models can facilitate training and development programs. One of the main, and perhaps least surprising, uses of MOOCs and MOOC elements is in blended learning. Blended learning is a model in which online and instructor-led environments are combined to enhance learner mastery and success. This isn’t just randomly introducing technology into classrooms; instead, it is harnessing the power of technology to streamline the educational process, free instructors to spend more of their time actually teaching, and provide learners with the additional supports they need to succeed. Blended learning is not a new idea in corporate training and development. It is commonly used for onboarding new employees and has many other applications as well, especially when training needs to be delivered to many different people across various locations. Blended learning helps trainers better meet the needs of learners. People learn differently—with different styles and at different paces. Through blended environments, instructors can cater to the diversity of their learner group.Here are three main advantages of blended learning identified by Michelle Reece and Barbara Lockee in their article "Improving training outcomes through blended learning": Using elearning methods, trainers can assess learners prior to training, which can inform the development of instructional materials. Blended learning can also facilitate prework so that when new hires arrive for instructor-led training, they are ready to hit the ground running. Blended learning is instrumental in learner retention and the practical application of learning in the workplace. Even after the instructor-led portion of the training is over, online resources such as course content and discussion boards exist for learners to refer to in their work. Elearning methods, like training simulations, can also provide opportunities for learners to practice before they encounter real problems. So how can MOOCs be used in blended learning? MOOC methods and technologies can provide the basis for blended courses, while instructors provide supplemental guidance. This idea is already being used in higher education. This semester, professors at Harvard and Berkeley are using the edX platform to deliver what they call SPOCs, or small private online courses. SPOCs are like MOOCs in that they use video lectures, discussion boards, machine-graded assessments, and other MOOC elements, but they are unlike MOOCs in that they are open only to students enrolled at their respective schools (and in Harvard’s case up to 500 additional participants). Students in Harvard and Berkeley’s SPOC take their courses online, but still meet in person for projects and discussions. The advantages of this format for training and development programs are many: The blended learning model supplements the major advantages of MOOCs (i.e., repeatability, scalability, and technology) with the face-to-face interaction many learners require. The team at Harvard sees this as a way to combat the famously high MOOC dropout rates. Trainers can use MOOC elements like video training sessions and even webinars to increase efficiency of the training process so that they can spend more of their time in one-on-one interactions. Blended learning can be scaled more easily across an entire organization than can instructor-led training. This is especially important as companies rely on fewer employees to carry out their training agendas. According to the Big Ideas blog over at Omnipress, the trainer-to-learner ratio is falling and n ow sits at about 5 to 1000. Companies are trying to do more with less. The SPOC model is perfect for companies that don’t want to run true MOOCs (due to intellectual property or privacy concerns), but are still seeking efficiencies in their training programs. The corporate SPOC is essentially a MOOC run on a private Intranet. These courses can be hosted on an existing learning management system without having to worry about whether it will accommodate unlimited users. Like in MOOCs, trainers only need to develop the instructional materials once and then they can be used repeatedly. But SPOCs have the advantage of having an in-person instructor available to address changes or new developments in a field or process without needing to redesign the learning resources. Trainers can license externally developed training content, or use freely available materials, as the starting point from which to design a company-specific curriculum. MOOCs didn’t kill classrooms; they just made classrooms much, much bigger. Similarly, MOOC methods and elements will expand both the scope and the effectiveness of blended learning environments. This new model will boost onboarding and other training efforts by allowing L&D departments to deliver more personalized training to more people in a shorter period of time. Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:New MOOC Environments: Distributed Open Collaborative…Using MOOCs in Corporate Training ProgramsMOOCs: Flipping the Corporate ClassroomMOOCs and MicrolearningHow to MOOC: Designing Effective MOOC Training Programs(Visited 17 times, 1 visits today)

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have lately been moving in different directions. Instructors at various institutions have taken the fundamental parts of MOOCs (video lectures, interactive elements, etc.) and reworked them to meet the needs of their particular schools and students. This reworking has given rise to a variety of new MOOC-like courses, including big open online courses (BOOCs), synchronous massive online courses (SMOCs), and small private online courses (SPOCs). Although they all take different forms, these new courses share a common foundation of MOOC principles and components. With these new instructional formats, we are starting to see real innovation in the way instruction is delivered. These new models can also provide solutions for businesses looking for new ways to deliver more efficient and more effective training. One of the more interesting models to emerge is the distributed open collaborative course, aka the DOCC. Though billed as an "anti-MOOC," a DOCC is a model that combines MOOC elements with personalized tools to meet the needs of individual learners and learning groups. Instead of using a single complete set of learning resources (videos, readings, forums, assignments, tests, and so on) to automatically deliver instruction to all learners, a DOCC consists of individual "nodal" courses built around a central theme. The core learning materials for each nodal course are the same, but the approach to those materials is different. The first DOCC, "Dialogues on Feminism and Technology," is taking place this semester at fifteen colleges and universities across the country. The core resources consist of a set of video lectures and a variety of learning activities, and instructors at each institution have built a unique course around these core resources. There is also an online section of the course which, in true MOOC style, is open to anyone at no cost. Aside from being centered on a common theme each week, the different nodal courses operate independently. Faculty and students across all institutions have opportunities to collaborate and share ideas and resources via social networking activities like blogging and Tweeting. In addition, some course projects require students to engage in cooperative learning activities. By using MOOC principles and elements in a format that also addresses the needs of individual learners and learner groups, DOCCs respond to one of the main criticisms that has been leveled against MOOCs: that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work in education. How can corporate trainers use the DOCC model to improve organizational training outcomes? One of the well-recognized challenges of developing training programs (and one of the major reasons many training programs don’t succeed) is that often a single approach is used regardless of learners’ needs. Industrial skills training firm ITC Learning names "the failure to modify training to bridge identifiable knowledge gaps" as one of the top two reasons corporate training fails. Amanda Thompson over at game-based learning company mLevel identifies the one-size-fits-all approach as the overall reason "corporate training can be terrible." She breaks down the problems with this approach as follows: Format: Too much content is delivered in too short a time and in a single format (e.g., a PowerPoint deck). Non-personalized instruction: Everyone receives the same instruction at the same time and pace. Learners’ needs: Little attention is paid to what learners already know and what their training needs really are. This lack of understanding about learners’ levels makes it nearly impossible to effectively assess what (if anything) they learn during the training. Little interaction: In typical training sessions, there is little interaction between learners, which results in low engagement and low retention. Corporate training doesn’t need to be terrible, and it certainly shouldn’t fail. So what can we do about it? How can we leverage the power of MOOCs and technology while at the same time providing meaningful training to individuals? We can start by recognizing that within an organization, employees at different levels may have diverse training needs even for the same overall topic. For example, although leadership training at all levels is based on the same general principles and theories, managers have different training needs depending on whether they are in charge of a team, a unit, or an entire department. Those who manage Millennials require different training from those who manage Baby Boomers or Gen Xers. And in multinational corporations, departmental managers may require different training based on the country in which they are based. These are just a few examples of individual needs that must be addressed if training programs are to be of any real value. Using the DOCC format, corporate trainers can benefit from all of the advantages of MOOCs, such as cost savings, accessibility, and analytics, while still providing trainings appropriate for the needs of different learners. The basic curriculum and learning materials only need to be designed once, but they can be used in combination with instructor-led training (either virtual or classroom-based) that is tailored to the learners’ needs. Like in the DOCC, this training can be delivered to an entire company simultaneously and virtual spaces like discussion forums, Twitter feeds, and wikis can be utilized to encourage collaboration and sharing across learner groups. In many ways, the DOCC is able to respond simultaneously to criticisms of corporate training, MOOCs, and elearning in general. This is a technology-based approach that is at the same time customizable and infinitely scalable, and allows training to be delivered to an unlimited number of employees while also providing opportunities for interaction. It represents an excellent solution for organizations looking to deliver highly quality training to employees at all levels. Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:New MOOC Models: Blended LearningWhat Type of MOOC Is Right For You?MOOCs and MicrolearningHow to MOOC: Designing Effective MOOC Training ProgramsBy the Numbers: Learning from MOOCs(Visited 13 times, 1 visits today)

Over the past several months, I’ve written about the many advantages of using MOOCs in training programs and given suggestions for how L&D departments can most effectively incorporate this new training format. In this article, we’ll look at some of the MOOCs that have been developed specifically for training purposes and business audiences, as well as how some companies are already using these courses are part of their workplace training and development programs. MOOCs for Business and Training Some enterprising startups have recently developed training MOOCs. For now, these are mostly in the technology fields, but the scope is rapidly expanding. In addition, the major MOOC providers now offer a variety of MOOCs targeted toward a business audience. Aquent Gymnasium. Aquent, a staffing agency for the marketing and creative industries, recently launched Aquent Gymnasium, a MOOC provider that offers technology courses for creative professionals. The first course, "Coding for Designers," is a basic programming course for professional designers to help them work more effectively with software developers. The next two courses that will be offered focus on technologies for Web design. The Muse. Job search site The Muse has expanded into MOOCs. Though the target audience is job seekers, the available courses focus on soft skills that could be used for training, such as "Becoming a Networking Master" and "Management 101." openSAP. Business management software company SAP offers several MOOCs for developers including "Introduction to Software Development on SAP HANA," "Introduction to Mobile Solutions Development," and "In-Memory Data Management." MongoDB. Database company MongoDB offers training MOOCs on its database products. Open Education Alliance. Open Education Alliance is a recently announced collaboration between MOOC provider Udacity and companies including Google, Autodesk, AT&T, and NVidia. The participant companies have each pledged $250,000 toward developing MOOCs to bridge the gap between what students learn in traditional universities and the skills employers are seeking. The alliance is also working on an alternative credentialing system for the free online courses. Academic MOOCs. As part of their ongoing quest for a viable business model, Coursera and edX are also making plays for the business market. This fall, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania put its first-year MBA courses on Coursera. All of the courses are eligible for verified certificates through the Signature Track program. MIT also recently announced a plan to develop an XSeries on supply chain management on the edX platform. Students who complete all three courses will earn a verified certificate from MITx. Finally, Stanford’s NovoED platform hosts a variety of entrepreneurship MOOCs including courses on leadership, finance, and decision making. The Stanford Graduate School of Business launched its first MOOC, "The Finance of Retirement and Pensions," on the platform this fall. Examples of How Companies Are Using MOOCs It is difficult to know exactly how many organizations are already using MOOCs and MOOC elements in their training and development programs, but we can point to a few high-profile examples. McAfee. According to a Forbes report, computer security company McAfee recently used a MOOC model to solve one of its major training problems: its new-hire orientation process used to take more than 80 hours, and many employees were not completing the process. To tackle this problem, McAfee "flipped the classroom," so that students access the content on their own time and use in-class time for discussions and activities. McAfee told Forbes that the change resulted in both decreased training time and increased sales. Yahoo! Yahoo! sponsors its employees to earn verified certificates through Coursera’s Signature Track program. According to Patricia Brogan, the manager of Yahoo!’s Developer Academy, the company partnered with Coursera as a way to encourage employees to continue to develop their technical skills so that they can apply them toward designing and creating innovative new products. JLT Group. Insurance company JLT has been using MOOCs as part of its employee training and development at several levels. According to an interview with training manager Sunder Ramachandran, the initiative is aimed at addressing the training needs of a diverse, young, and changing workforce. So far, JLT employees have participated in Coursera’s "Introduction to Public Speaking," "Intro to Operations Management," and a couple of introductory finance courses. According to Ramachandran, JLT has achieved "moderate success" with the program and is experimenting with using MOOCs in conjunction with small in-person study groups. Using MOOCs in corporate and workforce education has benefits on all sides. For MOOC providers, training courses are a possible source of revenue, while for organizations they represent a way to deliver more effective training more quickly and at a reduced cost. With large company-funded initiatives like the Open Education Alliance, we can expect to see more MOOCs developed specifically for training purposes in the near future. And as organizations continue to look for new ways to improve their L&D programs, we will no doubt see more businesses choosing the MOOC model. For companies looking for new ways to deliver training, engage employees more meaningfully in the learning process, or offer more flexible and accessible training solutions, now is a great time to consider trying a MOOC. Copyright 2013 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:MOOCs: Personal Initiative and Professional DevelopmentMOOCs to Bridge the Workplace Skills GapMOOCs: From the Classroom to the Conference RoomWhat Type of MOOC Is Right For You?Using MOOCs in Corporate Training Programs(Visited 41 times, 1 visits today)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As we saw in the previous post, real data on MOOCs is just starting to become available. Using the results of studies, as well as the combined experiences of instructors and learners, we can start to define the factors that make MOOCs successful. The first article took a global approach, focusing on technology, support, and other aspects of the digital learning environment. This article takes a more microscopic approach, exploring MOOCs on the level of individual courses. Clear objectives There are many different types of MOOCs out there and many different ways to participate in them. This is one of the great advantages of the format—it is flexible so learners can adapt the courses to meet their individual needs (e.g., determining their own objectives, choosing what content to engage with, deciding which social learning tools to use, etc.). But more formal environments, like corporate training, require clearly stated and achievable objectives that are directly relevant to the job requirements. Even when using third-party MOOCs or MOOC elements, trainers may need to develop the desired learning objectives and communicate them to learners. Accountability As informal learning environments, MOOCs don’t have any built-in accountability. But as training and development departments are well aware, no accountability usually leads to no results. Accountability can be incorporated into MOOCs in a couple of ways. For example, a high school in Missouri is experimenting with allowing students to take MOOCs for credit. In addition to completing the courses, students are required to demonstrate their learning by completing a project. Businesses that want to benefit from MOOCs should consider ways, beyond certificates of completion, to hold employees accountable for their training. Instructor as facilitator The availability of information online has steadily been changing the role of the instructor in classrooms from elementary schools to corporate universities. Instructors no longer need to focus on delivering content, because content is available at our fingertips. As Kyle Peck wrote over at Evolllution, "People can learn without being taught. Technologies can do a better job of conveying information and developing understanding than can lectures." MOOCs should not just be regular courses videotaped and put online—this method is not only inefficient in terms of learning, but also it doesn’t put the technology to its best possible use. Good MOOCs are designed from the ground up as complete digital learning environments, and part of this design is to shift the role of the instructor from being primarily a deliverer of content to being a facilitator for learning. In a facilitator role, instructors point learners to curated resources, initiate and moderate discussions, and provide opportunities for students to connect with one another. They also design meaningful assessments and develop ways to provide feedback, such as through peer-reviewed assignments.   Interactivity Interactivity in MOOCs happens in three main ways: learner-instructor, learner-learner, and learner-content. In general, learner-instructor interactivity is relatively limited due to the sheer number of students, though Coursera has been experimenting with volunteer "community teaching assistants." Learner-learner interactivity can take place via discussion boards, social media, blogs, and chat rooms, to name just a few, but just opening a discussion board or starting a Twitter conversation is not enough to ensure effective interaction. A recent study published in the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching evaluated the use of a Stanford MOOC in a blended learning environment and found that students preferred to interact in local communities (i.e., with others in the face-to-face section of the course) than in global communities (the MOOC as a whole). Organizations using MOOCs for T&D can enhance the interactivity of the courses by providing virtual spaces for users to interact locally, such as within a workgroup or department. These conversations and discussions can even contribute to an organizational knowledge base. Finally, learner-content interaction can be maximized through multimedia, simulations, gamification, and other strategies that go beyond clicking through a PowerPoint deck. Group activities In addition to online discussions, good MOOCs also encourage user engagement and participation through group projects and activities. For example, learners in corporate MOOCs can role play, practice presentation and speaking skills, write business plans, and so on. Using collaboration technologies like Google Docs and Skype, these learners don’t need to be in the same room, or even in the same country. Group activities enhance the element of peer learning, which is responsible for a majority of the learning in business environments, and help ensure that learners are keeping up with the course. They can also foster communication and culture-building throughout an organization. Over the past two articles, we’ve identified ten factors that contribute to MOOC success. Some of these factors are general guidelines for effective training, some are best practices for online learning, and others focus on gaining the maximum benefit from the technologies that make MOOCs unique. Not all of these factors are present in all MOOCs, but the format is flexible enough that it can be easily adapted to include them. For example, a company could require its employees to enroll in a Coursera course and then set up spaces for offline support, local interactivity, and group collaboration. Taking all of these factors together, it becomes clear that MOOCs are not just a new technology in which to place existing training courses. Rather, the format and the myriad technologies available give us the tools we need to completely redesign the training process from the ground up, and innovative companies are starting to take advantage of these tools to create new, more engaging and more effective, models of instruction.  Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Learner-Centered Instruction in MOOCsNew MOOC Models: Blended LearningNew MOOC Environments: Distributed Open Collaborative…How MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILTKey Factors in MOOC Success, Part 1(Visited 36 times, 1 visits today)

Modern education is currently at a crossroads. Steadily marching down one road are MOOCs—the massive online courses that are changing the way teachers teach and the way learners learn, both online and in the classroom. Charging down the other is the idea of learner-centered instruction, which has been steadily gaining popularity in training and development departments. On the surface, it seems like these two forces are in opposition to each other—MOOCs involve expanding virtual classrooms to hold literally thousands of people, while learner-centered instruction involves shrinking the classroom to focus on the needs of individuals. But these two trends are not nearly so far apart as you might think. Although one of the biggest criticisms of MOOCs is that they offer a one-size-fits-all approach to a many-sided problem, the digital learning environment (and the technology-enabled learning tools that support it) is flexible enough to allow for personalized, learner-centered approaches to instruction. MOOC pioneer George Siemens defines learner-centered instruction like this: "In a true learner-centered environment, the learner is the beginning and end point of the learning process, and his/her needs are the focus of the course/program/organization….Basically, the learner, not the instructor, organization, or software, is in control of the learning experience." As instructional designer Karen Sieczka notes, learner-centered training is well tailored to how adults learn—rather than "force-feeding information," the goal is to provide learners with knowledge and skills that they can immediately apply to their jobs. The information needs be realistic, relevant, and delivered in the way adults learn best. The benefits of learner-centered instruction are many: first and foremost, in terms of creating valuable learning experiences, it seems to work very, very well. MOOC critics have been quick to label the courses as teacher-centered, rather than learner-centered. This is because currently the dominant model is that found on Coursera: students watch video lectures and do readings, and then take tests or do assignments. This approach is teacher-centered, but that doesn’t make this a valid argument against MOOCs in general. Larry Cuban, a professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, has noted that MOOCs are often confused with pedagogy, which is inaccurate. He writes: "Conflating MOOCs with instructional methods misleads professors, students, and the public about what teachers teach and what students learn." A MOOC is a powerful method of delivering a course, but a teacher still teaches it. There is no reason that MOOCs can’t be used to create learner-centered digital learning environments, and in fact several MOOCs (including the very first MOOC and several courses found on smaller providers like Canvas Network and NovoEd) already are. So, how can we create a learner-centered environment in a MOOC? Maryellen Weimer, who literally wrote the book on the subject, has identified five characteristics of learner-centered teaching. Let’s see how these characteristics can be applied to MOOCs: 1. Learner-centered teaching engages students in the hard, messy work of learning. MOOCs, almost by definition, are hard and messy. They require learners to be independent and self-motivated, and to take ownership over their own learning experiences. For organizations, this means learners need to be given the opportunities, the tools, and the support they need to be responsible for their own learning. This can range from providing time in the day for employees to access their courses to ensuring that the courses are compatible with mobile devices. 2. Learner-centered teaching includes explicit skill instruction. This characteristic is practically built in as many training and development programs are geared specifically toward explicit skill instruction. Breaking up learning into bite-sized chunks, which is the hallmark of most MOOCs, supports skill acquisition by providing learners with clear objectives and the tools to reach those objectives without having to invest a significant amount of time. 3. Learner-centered teaching encourages students to reflect on what they are learning and how they are learning it. According to Weimer, "the goal is to make students aware of themselves as learners and to make learning skills something students want to develop." This goal can be accomplished in various ways in MOOCs, including providing discussion prompts and developing assignments that ask learners to reflect on their own learning processes. This reflection doesn’t necessarily need to be formalized into the training process; even casual conversations around the water cooler or on Twitter can provoke reflection and discussion. 4. Learner-centered teaching motivates students by giving them some control over learning processes. In a MOOC, almost the entire learning process is self-directed. Learners decide what they need to learn and can access the information at the moment of need; they decide when, where, and at what pace they engage with the course; they find and share content; and they develop their own personal learning networks. This leads to feelings of autonomy and self-efficacy, which are vital components of learner motivation. 5. Learner-centered teaching encourages collaboration. Collaboration is another major hallmark of good MOOCs. As we have explored on several previous occasions, students in MOOCs participate in conversations on discussion boards and social media platforms, work together on projects using collaboration tools, share content via social bookmarking sites, and more. Used properly, MOOCs can greatly increase the levels of interactivity and collaboration in training programs, especially considering the baseline in many organizations is lectures, seminars, or individual elearning, which often involve no collaboration at all. When we think about MOOCs and their applications in 21st century digital learning environments, we need to keep in mind the distinction Larry Cuban describes between technology, or format, and pedagogy. MOOCs are powerful platforms for delivering instruction, but they are not in themselves pedagogies. Instead, they allow organizations to create and deliver training courses to meet their needs while still benefiting from the best practices in instructional design, including a learner-centered approach to teaching. This is just one more area where MOOCs are expanding the boundaries of what is possible in education. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Key Factors in MOOC Success, Part 2New MOOC Environments: Distributed Open Collaborative…MOOCs and MicrolearningKey Factors in MOOC Success, Part 1New MOOC Models: Blended Learning(Visited 36 times, 1 visits today)