The entire corporate and workplace training landscape is shifting. I’m not talking just new technologies or new formats, though these things have certainly been some of the major players. I’m talking an entirely new concept of what training means. There are two main forces driving the shift in training: ROI. Businesses have historically been very bad at measuring the return-on-investment of their training programs. Trainings are too often evaluated based on hours of seat-time, rather than by any real assessment of knowledge and skills. But many companies have started to wise up—the current business environment is too competitive for organizations to invest time and money in training without observing any impact on the bottom line. And when you start to actually look at the numbers, it becomes apparent that many traditional forms of instructor-led training are frankly not worth it: people forget 90 percent of what they learn sitting in a classroom, often by the time they walk out the door. Content is no longer king. In 1996, Bill Gates wrote a famous article in which he declared content to be king. But today, content is everywhere—we have more content available at our fingertips than we know what to do with! The trick now is for companies to realize value from that content, which in training and development means knowledge and skills that can be immediately applied on the job—in other words, providing relevant training that employees can actually use. The need for real results, coupled with the abundance of content, has meant that training models based solely on knowledge transfer are becoming obsolete. What is replacing these models? A combination of knowledge transfer and performance support. Performance support is just-in-time learning that puts the knowledge employees need in their hands exactly at the moment they need it—not before (when they are unlikely to remember it), not after (when it is no longer useful), but right then and there. Performance support can take many forms: the quintessential types are checklists and other job aids, but in its broadest definition, performance support can include apps, YouTube videos, wikis and other knowledge bases, and even other people. Effective performance support is embedded (i.e., the learning takes place in the course of, rather than separate from, the work), guides workflows and processes, and gives people real-time access to the information they need. The idea of performance support is not new, but new learning-enabled technologies and digital learning environments are expanding its possibilities and bringing it to the attention of many organizations. Now, companies that want to effectively train their employees and ensure employees actually remember what they learn are looking for ways to integrate both knowledge transfer and performance support into their training programs. Massive open online courses (MOOCs), which are the rising stars of the corporate training world, provide the perfect opportunity for businesses to do exactly that. Performance support has not been a large focus of the MOOC discussion thus far, but now seems like an excellent time to open the conversation. As Gary Wise recently wrote on his Living in Learning blog, "MOOCs came from an academic birthright, and they are structured to accomplish the transfer of knowledge in some very innovative "flipped classroom" approaches that are less structured and open to participants to discover and learn through multiple forms of content delivery, media, and venues. Perfect. This will work in the corporate world as well. My question is why stop here? Let’s flip the whole dynamic learning and support ecosystem, not just the classroom." MOOCs are more than just online courses—they use new technologies in an innovative format, but more than that they represent a new way of thinking about workplace training and development. The features of these new digital learning environments enable them to serve both as training courses and as performance support that can be used long after the courses are completed. Here are several aspects of MOOCs that blur the traditional boundaries between training and performance support: Course archives. The key to using MOOCs both as courses and performance support is the availability of various resources in easily accessible archives. For example, for many MOOCs on Coursera, students can login even after the course is over and still have access to the materials, discussion boards, and so on. Content. OK, I know I just said that content is no longer king, but some MOOC content is different. Most of the content in MOOCs is delivered as short videos. These resources, especially task-specific tutorials, can be used later as performance support. In a sense, a MOOC can be seen as a way to guide learners through a curated collection of relevant resources that they can later access at the point of need. People. In addition to delivering knowledge and skills, one of the main goals of MOOCs is to foster connections between people. Through discussion boards, social media, virtual collaborations, and so on, learners develop their own personal learning networks that last long after the course is over. These networks, which may contain fellow learners, trainers, and even experts in the field, remain accessible via Twitter and other social networking sites and provide additional places employees can turn for answers to questions and solutions to problems. Resource sharing. Trainers can analyze workflows and create checklists, but often the best job aids are developed by the people who are actually using them. MOOCs are built on a philosophy of sharing, and by encouraging learners to create and share resources—via social bookmarking sites (e.g., Delicious and Pinterest), wikis, and other user-contributed knowledge bases—organizations can harness the knowledge of both instructors and learners to create highly effective performance support. Mobile learning. MOOCs haven’t gone completely mobile yet, but it’s coming, and soon all of these resources and more will be available to learners wherever they are. MOOCs and performance support are both on the rise in corporate training. Separately, they have the potential to change how companies think about and implement their training programs, but their benefits will be significantly compounded when these trends converge into an entirely new model of organizational learning. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:How MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILTMOOCs and Unbundled TrainingKey Factors in MOOC Success, Part 2MOOCs and MicrolearningHow to MOOC: Meaningful Assessment Through Real-World…(Visited 27 times, 1 visits today)

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been around for almost two years, and in that time, a large amount of data about the courses has been generated. Now, researchers are starting to probe what kinds of students take MOOCs, why they take them, and what factors contribute to individual student success. These are important, no doubt, particularly in higher education, but companies interested in using MOOCs for training and development are also interested in the success of the courses as a whole—not just for individual students, but for organizations overall. This is an especially interesting issue for a couple of reasons: first, there is no consensus on how to measure the success of a MOOC in any environment, and second, companies are notoriously bad at measuring the returns on investment of their training programs in general. Over the course of of two articles, I will explore what constitutes meaningful measurement of training and how this measurement can be applied to MOOCs.  How Is MOOC Success Measured? This question has generated a significant amount of controversy. The first metric to be considered was the number of students completing the courses with passing grades (usually defined as 70 percent or better). Depending how you look at it, this metric leads to either an excellent or a terrible conclusion. If you consider the actual numbers of students, MOOCs have successfully educated millions of people worldwide, and instructors have been able to reach more students in a single class than they normally could in an entire career. But, if you instead consider the percentage of students who complete MOOCs, the picture is quite different—fewer than 10 percent of students who sign up for MOOCs stick it out until the end. But this is not really a valid way to measure success. As I described in an earlier post, many people sign up for MOOCs without ever intending to finish them, so completion rates don’t really tell us much. Raw numbers of students may be better, but without knowing what students were required to do to complete a course, they still don’t really tell us anything meaningful. So, what would be a meaningful measure of MOOC success? The current move in education, which is also valid for training and development, is to measure a MOOC according to its value. Then the question becomes, "What constitutes value?" To determine a MOOC’s value for education, Owen Youngman of Northwestern University suggests going straight to the source and asking the students. But for organizations, where training departments often need to constantly justify their existence and their expenses, we need to develop a more concrete way to measure value. How Are Training Programs Evaluated? Identifying a meaningful way to measure the value of MOOCs in organizations is complicated by the difficulty of measuring the ROI of training programs in general. The most widely used (at least in theory) method of evaluating training programs is the four-level model developed by Donald Kirkpatrick. According to this model, the four levels are: Reaction - The way learners react to their experience of the course Learning - The new knowledge, skills, and attitudes gained from the course Behavior - How well the new knowledge, skills, and attitudes are applied on the job Results - Reduced turnover, improved job performance and satisfaction, improved organizational performance, etc. I mentioned that this method is widely used—at least in theory. This is because in reality evaluation usually stops after Level 1: Reaction. Employees are asked to rate their satisfaction with various aspects of a course (often using what are known as "smiley sheets"), and then the evaluation is over. Despite the fact that the goal of training for employees is to learn knowledge, skills, and attitudes they can apply on the job (Level 3), and for organizations the goal is demonstrable improvements in the bottom line (Level 4), these outcomes are rarely measured. According to a 2006 report by Bersin & Associates, organizations feel that the number one most important thing to measure is how training programs impact employees’ jobs and the business, but less than 10 percent of organizations actually measure these outcomes. Clearly there is ample room for improvement. The key to measuring the effect of training programs on higher-level outcomes is twofold: First, for each course or program, create a list of agreed-upon metrics that will be used to measure success. Second, decide how each metric will be determined. As much as possible, tie each metric to a specific number or dollar value. For example, customer satisfaction, productivity, and turnover and retention rates can easily be converted into hard values. For less tangible metrics, like decision making, change leadership, and communication, use a combination of hard values and anecdotal evidence, as advocated by Jack Philips of the ROI Institute. In this article, we’ve examined some of the challenges associated with measuring the success of MOOCs and training programs in general. In the next post, I’ll explore some specific recommendations for how the tools and principles behind MOOCs can be used to assess the impact of training on the different levels in Kirkpatrick’s model. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Measuring Success (ROI) of a Training MOOC, Part 2By the Numbers: Learning from MOOCsKey Factors in MOOC Success, Part 1How to MOOC: Meaningful Assessment Through Real-World…Top 10 Training Metrics(Visited 51 times, 1 visits today)

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a rising trend in corporate and workplace training. The courses are still fairly new, and many questions remain to be answered. Currently, one of the hottest topics is how to measure the success of a MOOC. Although once everything is up and running, the marginal cost associated with MOOCs can approach zero, they still require significant upfront investments of both time and money. Organizations interested in using MOOCs as part of their training programs need to have a clear idea of the benefits they will realize—preferably reflected in their bottom line. In the previous post, I outlined the four-level model of evaluation developed by Donald Kirkpatrick. Here, we’ll explore how MOOCs and the data that comes out of them can be used to measure success at each of these four levels. Level 1: Reaction The reaction level refers to the way learners react to their experience of the course. Typically, this is assessed using "smiley sheets," on which participants rate different aspects of the course on a Likert scale. This process usually happens immediately after a course is completed, and unfortunately it often represents the only evaluation that actually takes place. Measuring success at this level is easily adopted into a MOOC, with the opportunity to collect much, much more data. In most MOOCs, the core content is delivered via video, and all of the learners’ interaction with the course materials takes place online. To increase engagement, many videos have quizzes embedded, and polls and surveys are common throughout the courses as well as during synchronous elements like live webinars. Rather than handing out a smiley sheet at the end, instructors can incorporate Level 1 evaluation into the MOOC by using polls and surveys to assess learners’ reactions in real time. In this way, not only will instructors be able to gather reaction data to individual elements of the course, but they will be able to use the data to make adjustments to the course if necessary. Level 2: Learning Learning in training programs is famously difficult to measure, but MOOCs provide a wealth of data that can be used to assess the progress of learning in real time. Depending on the platform and the data collection programs, learning management systems can collect massive amounts of data from MOOCs, including time on task, how learners interact with the course material, how many times they have to answer a question to get it right, and much, much more. The idea of combining big data with learning analytics is still very new, but already it is providing a powerful way to assess learning and engagement that wasn’t available before. Level 3: Behavior For learners and organizations, this is the most important individual level of measurement—the ability of learners to apply the new knowledge, skills, and attitudes they acquire in courses to their work. In the end it is the behavioral outcomes, not satisfaction with the training or how long it takes to work through a course, which will determine the impact of the program on an organization’s bottom line. This seem like the most opaque category of outcomes, but many newer MOOCs provide an excellent way to directly measure how well learning translates into behavior—by using real problems and projects as course assessments. Many instructor-led training programs don’t have much in the way of evaluation at all, and even traditional elearning relies far too heavily on multiple-choice assessment. But MOOCs, in which huge numbers of learners share resources, hold virtual discussions, and collaborate on projects, provide an ideal environment for incorporating the desired new behaviors directly into the training. This practice blurs the line between "training" and "work" and allows employees to put their newly acquired knowledge, skills, and attitudes directly into practice. This can help foster a learning mindset throughout the organization and also give learners a chance to practice their new skills, like decision making, in a lower-pressure, but real-world, environment such as a simulation. See here for a more in-depth look at how some companies are using MOOCs to solve real business problems. Level 4: Results Here is where all of the standard metrics—reduced turnover, increased job satisfaction, increased productivity, increased customer satisfaction, and so on—come into play. If the training program has proved successful at the other levels (particularly Level 3: Behavior), then Level 4 should emerge quite nicely. Remember that in order to achieve valid results, organizations need to decide in advance what metrics are tied to each course as well as how those metrics will be measured—in hard numbers if possible. At this fourth level, there are two final things that are important to keep in mind. First, training is an investment, not a cost. What’s important is the ROI an organization will realize as a result of the training program, and for some metrics (like the bottom line) this return may take a longer to show up than, for example, the reaction data on smiley sheets, but the costs of not training employees are infinitely higher than the investment in training them. Second, measuring the ROI of training programs in general is very new, and thus far it is virtually untested in MOOCs. So, if the first numbers don’t look as good as hoped, instructors can use them as guides for how to improve the courses in the future. This points to an additional advantage of MOOCs—because the courses are broken up into bite-sized pieces, if something isn’t working, it’s easy to replace just that portion of the course and immediately put the new material in the hands of all learners. MOOCs are still very new players in the corporate training environment. The goal of these two articles has been to explore a way to meaningfully assess the value of training MOOCs, a topic that will have increased relevance in the near future as more companies adopt this new format and the evaluation tools improve. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Measuring Success (ROI) of a Training MOOC, Part 1MOOC Analytics: What Corporate Training Can Learn from Big…How to MOOC: Meaningful Assessment Through Real-World…Beyond Cost-Savings: Advantages of MOOCs for Corporate…7-Steps to Creating an Effective E-learning Program Part 5:…(Visited 44 times, 1 visits today)

The education and training worlds are fond of buzzwords, too many of which tend to be old ideas wrapped in shiny new packaging. But there is one buzzword that is set to transform the way we think about education from higher education classrooms to corporate training and development departments: unbundling. We are all familiar with the concept of bundling—we use Expedia to get better prices by bundling our flights, hotels, and car rentals together, and we bundle our cable and Internet packages to save money as well. While bundling may be great for saving money on vacations and utilities, the all-in-one format that is currently the standard in education seems to have run its course. Now, thought leaders are exploring ways to improve education by breaking it into its component parts. One of the biggest current proponents of unbundling in the education sphere is Anant Agarwal, MIT professor and president of massive open online course (MOOC) provider edX. In a December Huffington Post article, Agarwal characterized unbundling as focusing on three major aspects of education: time, function, and content. Briefly, the idea of unbundling time refers to moving away from the traditional four-year degree formula and instead imagining "an alternative path of lifelong continuous education," which may involve formal classes at various institutions, MOOCs, real-world experiences, and pretty much any other form of learning. Unbundling function refers to partnering with other organizations to provide services like facilities management, healthcare, food service, and other functions that are not central to the main goal of providing an education. Finally, unbundling content refers to using various forms of content—digital textbooks, MOOCs, open educational resources, etc.—depending on the needs of the course and the learners. Agarwal’s vision is a new system that takes advantage of new educational technologies, like MOOCs, to provide the kind of education modern students need: one that emphasizes learning as a lifestyle and takes into account knowledge, skills, and attitudes obtained from many different sources. This vision is pretty revolutionary, but colleges and universities are starting to take note—already MIT has released a report describing unbundling as a new model for education. Organizations can also benefit from unbundling their training and development programs, particularly as it refers to time and content. First, unbundling time. Time is perhaps even more of a pressing issue for companies than it is for higher education institutions. Employees need training, and that training needs to be delivered quickly, efficiently, and often—in today’s rapidly changing environment, a continuous program of training is the only way to ensure that employees’ knowledge and skills are kept up-to-date and that businesses remain competitive. Most traditional training programs, which rely on one or a few days of instructor-led training over the course of a year simply don’t cut it anymore. Not only do these programs focus too heavily on "seat-time," but learners are apt to forget almost everything as soon as they walk out the door because they don’t have an immediate opportunity to apply it. The MOOC format can help organizations to unbundle time by providing on-demand, widespread access to training courses, resources, personal learning networks, performance support, and more, when and where the employees need those resources. Training time becomes embedded in the workday, rather than taking place outside of it. Organizations can benefit from unbundling content by using a variety of resources located around the Web—articles, YouTube videos, even full MOOCs—as learning materials for their employees. There are many excellent resources out there, which in the context of a MOOC can be curated and shared through social media, social bookmarking, wikis, and so on. Unbundling content gives trainers the greatest flexibility in designing courses and gives learners the opportunity to participate in the creation of an organizational knowledge base. There is another type of unbundling happening in education that has particular importance for organizations: unbundling learning from credentials. As corporate branding, marketing, and training guru Jeanne Meister recently told Online Educa: "Unbundling learning will be the future, as providers detach the coursework from the certificate, allowing learners to participate in various strands of learning, and opting in to a verified certificate of completion. Online learning modules are not completed with a degree or certificate but also include the ability to share one’s increased knowledge on a social network. Using education to advance your personal brand and long-term employability will become increasingly important as employers use data analytics to find top talent online." The MOOC format is ideal for unbundling time, content, and learning in a training context: courses can be long or short—designed to meet the needs of a diverse group of learners; content can be created or curated by both instructors and learners and shared across an organization’s learning network; and training certificates can be unbundled into mini-credentials, like digital badges. Overall, using the MOOC format to unbundle training will result in some huge benefits for organizations: More focus on knowledge and skills acquired, less on time spent in a classroom. Better development of and access to organizational knowledge through collective creation and sharing of learning resources. New forms of credentials that represent real knowledge and skills that can be applied. Unbundling is likely to be a major topic of conversation in the training sphere this year. As you make your training and development plans for the year, think about how using an unbundled MOOC format can help your organization meet its goals in 2014 and beyond. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:13 Megatrends in MOOCsHow MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILTMOOCs and Performance SupportMegatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate Universities2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?(Visited 27 times, 2 visits today)

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

If you’ve been following the MOOC news, you’ll know that massive open online courses have had their ups and downs. In 2012, which the New York Times dubbed "the year of the MOOC," traditional higher education found itself truly threatened by new forces. Hopes for the courses were high and so was the pushback, but the conversation had begun. Then, in 2013, MOOCs started to really take off and evolve—millions of people participated in the free online courses, and new formats began to emerge, some of which I’ve explored in this blog. Also in 2013, companies started to sit up and take notice. More organizations became faced with skills gaps, which came in two major flavors. First, companies were having even more difficulty finding qualified candidates to fill job openings—recent college and university graduates simply didn’t have the skills the companies required. And second, with technology changing so quickly, even current employees were falling behind. Traditional higher education was becoming inadequate for preparing people to enter the workforce, and traditional instructor-led training was becoming inadequate for keeping employees’ skills relevant and up to date. Faced with these challenges, a few pioneer companies started to turn to MOOCs as a way to train large numbers of learners in a short time and at a relatively low cost. But many companies remained skeptical about MOOCs, perhaps waiting to see their results in higher education before overhauling their own training programs. Well, the results are starting to come in—MOOCs continue to be hugely popular (more than 10 million students have enrolled worldwide), there are now more than 1200 courses available, and all three major MOOC providers (Coursera, edX, and Udacity) are working toward developing alternative credentials that may end up competing with the traditional degree when it comes to organizations’ hiring decisions. With these developments, more companies are seeing MOOCs as promising models of training and development, and 2014 will quite possibly be the year the massive courses really start to make waves in corporate training. Bersin by Deloitte, which analyzes trends in human resources, talent, and learning, recently released its 2014 Corporate Learning Factbook, and for training in general, and technology-based training in particular, the future looks very bright. As Josh Bersin put in a recent Forbes article: "The economic recovery is clearly here: spending on corporate training is soaring." Here are some highlights from his assessment: In the United States, spending on corporate training increased 15 percent last year, representing the highest rate of growth over the past 7 years. More than 7 in 10 organizations say "capability gaps" is one of their top five challenges, and many report that it takes between 3 and 5 years for employees to become "fully productive." High-performing companies spend more than average on training, suggesting that the increased investment pays off. Technology is changing how training is done. Less than half of total training time is spent in a classroom, with nearly 20 percent being delivered via mobile devices. Companies are using digital learning environments to expand the reach of their training programs. The learning management system (LMS) market is also expanding rapidly, and MOOCs are set "to radically impact corporate training, as branded universities put more and more courses online." In 2014, these trends are expected to continue: organizations will pour even more money into their training programs and increase their use of technology. How will that happen? Well, in a SlideShare presentation posted last December, Bersin suggests that more and more companies will likely start using MOOCs. According to the presentation, 70 percent of Bersin by Deloitte members are interested in exploring MOOCs for corporate training, and while only about 7 percent of organizations are currently using them, nearly one-third have plans to start doing so. But MOOCs are more than just new training formats—they are more like all-in-one vehicles for recruitment, training and development, and even advertising and customer relations. Bersin identifies seven main ways companies are using MOOCs: Building talent pipelines Onboarding new employees Self-directed development Workforce training Educating partners and customers Brand marketing Collaboration and innovation MOOCs can be powerful training tools for corporations partly because many employees are already using them to upgrade their skills. And while much is made of the low completion rates associated with most MOOCs, this limitation doesn’t really apply to the corporate training environment. According to Alan Ruby, a MOOC researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, "when people are using a MOOC to upgrade their knowledge on something specific for their industry, the completion rate is much better." In fact, when learners pay the nominal fee (starting at $39) for a verified certificate on Coursera, the completion rate approaches 90 percent, which is probably more than can be said for most non-mandatory, non-compliance-related training and development programs available through either instructor-led training or traditional online courses. Over the next few articles, we’ll explore the new ways MOOCs allow companies to train and interact with their employees as well as communicate with customers, focusing on the seven ways companies are using MOOCs identified by Josh Bersin. By the end of the series, you will hopefully be convinced to give these new digital learning environments a try. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Using MOOCs: Self-Directed Development and Workforce…Using MOOCs: Finding and Onboarding New EmployeesMegatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate UniversitiesUsing MOOCs: Partner and Customer Relations13 Megatrends in MOOCs(Visited 102 times, 1 visits today)

Computer-based training (CBT) has been around in some form for roughly 50 years, and in that time it has generated a significant amount of buzz. Two of the biggest promises of CBT have been universal access to education (especially with the growth of online and mobile technologies) and adaptive learning—the ability to personalize learning experiences for individuals. Now, with massive open online courses (MOOCs) continuing to proliferate and new adaptive learning technologies popping up, it looks like 2014 might be the year these two promises are finally realized, together. MOOCs and adaptive learning have not quite gelled yet, but there are trends that suggest they will soon. And when they do, the face of workplace and corporate training will change completely. This article briefly reviews what adaptive learning is and how it can improve organizational training and development, and then describes various advancements and technologies that suggest adaptive learning could soon be incorporated into MOOCs to produce some of the most powerful training models we have seen so far. What is adaptive learning? The term adaptive learning has been thrown around a lot lately. It is a buzzword that is frequently equated with "personalized learning" and "customized learning." But what does that really mean? What makes learning adaptive? Wikipedia defines adaptive learning as "an educational method which uses computers as interactive teaching devices. Computers adapt the presentation of educational material according to students’ learning needs, as indicated by their responses to questions and tasks." This definition is a good start, but it leaves out a lot of important details. Is there a test at the end and then the computer re-presents information the learner got wrong or is the learning calibrated throughout the module? What inputs does the computer measure—just right and wrong answers or something more sophisticated? A much more ambitious definition is provided by the company Knewton. And they ought to know! Knewton’s relatively new adaptive learning platform is currently making major waves in education. According to Knewton, "Adaptive learning makes content dynamic and interactive, placing the student at the center of his or her individual learning experience. The platform monitors how the student interacts with the system and learns…It assesses not only what a student knows now, but also determines what activities and interactions…delivered in what sequence and medium, most greatly increase the possibility of that student’s academic success." In other words, adaptive learning creates a learning environment that changes according to the needs of individual students at exactly the time when change is necessary. It relies on psychometrics and data models and algorithms to provide each student with the optimal digital learning environment. That’s quite a promise! Why should companies care about adaptive learning? Many of the current adaptive learning technologies, like the platform developed by Knewton, are aimed at the educational market. But adaptive learning has an equally powerful role to play in organizational training and development, for at least two reasons. First, it can result in much better, and better-liked, learning than was previously possible. Companies are investing billions of dollars every year in computer-based and online training—adaptive technologies can help them ensure they are getting their money’s worth in terms of employees actually learning essential knowledge and applicable skills. Second, it can greatly facilitate compliance training, which seems to get more complex every year. In an article for Corporate Compliance Insights, Jan Sramek, the CEO of enterprise learning platform company Erudify, wrote that adaptive learning can improve compliance training by allowing learners to move quickly through information they already know, which can cut training time by 50 to 80 percent. In short, adaptive learning can improve training and development programs by helping employees learn more, faster. What do MOOCs have to do with adaptive learning? MOOCs themselves have yet to revolutionize education, and adaptive learning alone may or may not be revolutionary, but together these two movements represent a trend to be reckoned with. MOOCs have been criticized as a one-size-fits-all solution to a many-sided problem, but the incorporation of adaptive learning technologies brings with it the possibility of customizing training on a massive scale. With learner models generated from individual users as well as big data, adaptive learning technologies could not only automatically re-present information learners need to review, but also sense for example when they are getting bored and give them a prompt to increase engagement. One of the biggest proponents of adaptive learning MOOCs has been Nish Sonwalkar, a physics professor at the University of Massachusetts who sees huge potential in combining these two new technologies. He recently used an adaptive learning system in his MOOC on molecular biology. You can check out the basic pedagogical and technological frameworks here; learner behavior data are yet to be released. A few other adaptive learning experiments have also made recent headlines. Khan Academy, which is one of the largest repositories of free online learning resources, also tracks student data to provide customized learning. Last year, adaptive language-learning platform Instreamia sponsored a Spanish language MOOC. Even the federal government has joined the fray, with the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recommending the government support efforts to join MOOCs with adaptive learning. When asked by The Chronicle of Higher Education if adaptive software could help personalize the MOOC experience, Michael Feldstein, who used to build personalization tools for Cengage Learning, said "absolutely." According to the Chronicle, Feldstein believes MOOCs and adaptive software form a "natural marriage" and "could help compensate for the absence of individual hand-holding in a massive course." MOOCs and adaptive learning are the no longer just the next generation of digital learning environments: they’re here now. And with the current frantic pace of change in education and training, we will likely be realizing the potential of combining these two technologies in the very near future. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Adaptive LeadershipBeyond Cost-Savings: Advantages of MOOCs for Corporate…What Type of MOOC Is Right For You?MOOC: The King is Dead - Long Live the KingMOOC Analytics: What Corporate Training Can Learn from Big…(Visited 108 times, 6 visits today)

If you ask anyone in any company why their organization has a training and development program, you will probably be met with a look of confusion—obviously the purpose of T&D programs is to provide employees with the learning experiences necessary to perform their jobs at the highest level possible. But for MOOCs, it’s a different story. Certainly, they can be used for traditional knowledge transfer and skill building. But these are not your traditional training courses, and as massively open digital learning environments, they are proving to have applications way beyond employee training and development. In his SlideShare presentation "Putting MOOCs to Work," Josh Bersin identifies seven ways companies are using MOOCs, starting with identifying and training new hires all the way through to customer relations and facilitating innovation. In this article, I’ll explore the first two uses: building talent pipelines and on-boarding new employees. Building Talent Pipelines Organizations are currently having major problems finding and retaining qualified employees. The challenge to building talent pipelines comes in two forms: 1) there is a widening gap between the skills companies need and the skills job candidates have and 2) employees are no longer staying at the same company for the duration of their career. In fact, they aren’t staying very long at all—in the United States, employees work for the same company on average for only four years. This presents an additional challenge as many companies report it takes between three and five years for even a seasoned employee to become fully productive. This lack of reliable pipelines is hurting businesses. According a recent study, a majority of UK companies are failing to adequately identify and fill even the positions most critical for their success. MOOCs offer a way for companies to build talent pipelines by collaborating with MOOC providers both to design curriculums and to identify top students. Bersin identifies three main ways companies can do this: Candidate Screening. Both Coursera and Udacity have career placement services through which companies can connect with top students. Sponsorship. Companies can sponsor MOOCs or even full programs. For example, company-sponsored MOOCs are available for learning both SAP and MongoDB, and AT&T is sponsoring Georgia Tech’s $6,600 Computer Science MOOC Master’s program. Consortium. The Open Education Alliance is a consortium of tech companies including Google, Autodesk, and AT&T, who in partnership with Udacity develop curriculums and project-based learning tracks, and have pledged to hire students who successfully complete them. Through these types of programs, companies can announce job openings, identify promising new talent, and offer special courses and products to select students. In a December Harvard Business Review article, Jeanne Meister identified MOOCs as one of the top three social media tools companies are using to find job candidates. And students are starting to respond—the Open Education Alliance’s first programs were sold out prior to their launch in late January. Onboarding New Employees After identifying new employees via MOOCs, companies can also use the courses for onboarding. The process of onboarding typically lasts for about 90 days and can include everything from formal training courses to job shadowing, mentoring, and so on. The costs of onboarding can be significant. According to the Center for American Progress, the cost of replacing employees ranges from 16 percent of annual salary for those making less than $30,000 to more than 200 percent for those in highly paid positions like executives. Especially since employees may stay with the company for only four years, organizations can benefit significantly from cutting costs and increasing efficiency in their onboarding processes. As interactive digital learning environments, MOOCs can provide ways for companies to onboard new hires quickly and regardless of where in the world they are located. Because once a MOOC is developed, the marginal cost of adding learners is essentially zero, this method can be particularly beneficial for onboarding a large number of employees all at once. The benefits become even more striking when the employees are spread across different departments, locations, or even countries. For new hires not located the same geographic area, MOOCs can provide levels of interaction not found in traditional elearning (i.e., isolated in a room with a computer) or even in many instructor-led onboarding programs. This immediate interaction can promote social engagement and, with any luck, reduce the chances they will jump ship early on in the process. The most high-profile example of a company using MOOCs for onboarding is McAfee, which used a flipped classroom model to decrease the time and cost associated with its new hire orientation program, which before the switch required more than 80 hours of training, including pre-work, intensive onsite training, and post-work. According to the company, the new format resulted in not only cost savings, but also significant increases in sales productivity. Labeling MOOCs as just a new format for training and development misses the full potential of the courses. Jeanne Meister had it right in her article for Harvard Business Review—MOOCs can be considered a form of social media. As such, they provide ways for companies to interact with potential employees, long before any hiring decisions are made. The next article in this series will explore two uses of MOOCs that are probably more familiar: self-directed development and workforce training. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?Using MOOCs: Self-Directed Development and Workforce…Using MOOCs: Partner and Customer RelationsMegatrends in MOOCS: #5 Lifelong LearningHow MOOCs Are Used in Workplace Training(Visited 225 times, 1 visits today)

This series is exploring the seven main ways companies are using MOOCs as identified by Bersin by Deloitte. In the previous article, we looked at building talent pipelines and onboarding new employees: two uses for the massive courses that come at the very beginning of (and even before) a company develops a formal relationship with its employees. This article focuses on two subsequent aspects of that relationship—self-directed development and workforce training—which fit more neatly into traditional ideas about job skills learning and development. Self-Directed Development Many different types of learners take MOOCs, and they do so for many different reasons. One of the major reasons millions of people spend their free time taking online courses is to enhance their job-specific knowledge and skills to advance their career. In fact, more than six out of ten MOOC students take the courses either to learn more about their current field or to prepare themselves to enter a new one. That’s a huge number of learners engaging in self-directed development. I’ve written before about how companies can reward employees who take personal initiatives toward professional development, and in the roughly nine months since I wrote that article, many businesses have started doing exactly that. Companies including Yahoo!, Jardine Lloyd Thompson, and Deloitte now encourage their employees to enroll in MOOCs, and Yahoo! even reimburses employees for the expense of earning a verified certificate. MOOCs used in this way are essentially free training for organizations. Companies that wish to take advantage of their employees’ personal initiative can do so by vetting relevant MOOCs and providing support for employees who are taking them. For example, T&D departments can maintain and distribute a list of recommended MOOCs and their start dates, and even organize local seminars and discussions for employees who choose to enroll. They can also develop supplementary materials and activities to convey proprietary content and encourage critical thinking and interaction among employees. There are many options for how to incorporate employees’ personal learning initiatives into an organizational training program. The important thing is for companies to recognize and support this learning; otherwise, they risk losing valued employees to a company that does. Workforce Training Of the seven ways companies are using MOOCs, this is the one that is most familiar. The annual cost of job training and certification has reached $160 billion, or nearly $1200 per employee, and results of a recent study by Skillsoft suggest that while nearly all CEOs recognize the importance of workforce training, they are looking for ways to make that training faster and more efficient. In fact, more than 40 percent of CEOs say the length of a training program is even more important than the content. According to Skillsoft managing director Kevin Young, "The research shows that business leaders increasingly appreciate the value of learning. However, while training budgets themselves are not being cut, the time businesses have available to undertake training sessions is clearly shrinking….Courses need to be more succinct and to-the-point than ever, delivered in highly relevant, bite-sized pieces." MOOCs have huge potential in workforce training programs because they are design to provide training in those "highly relevant, bite sized pieces" that companies need, at a cost that is relatively low and with an efficiency that makes traditional training look like the Pony Express. These features of MOOCs are especially important now, as knowledge is changing quickly and employees need immediate solutions, not long drawn-out training programs. Coursera’s head of business development Julia Stiglitz made this point in a recent CNBC article, noting that "the companies are looking for new ways to train their employees and get them up to speed on skills that may not have been relevant five years ago." The list of companies that are using MOOCs in their workforce training programs is impressive and growing. It now includes Google, which had 80,000 employees enroll in a Udacity programming course; steel manufacturing giant Tenaris, which is using edX’s platform to deliver training to its employees; and communications company Telus, which has trained more than 40,000 employees via a MOOC-like digital learning environment. Programs like these have met with success. According to the CNBC article cited above, business software management developer Brightpearl has been using Udemy to train salespeople, with the result that the salespeople trained online produced more than 30 percent more revenue than a comparable group taught through traditional instructor-led training. Results like this suggest that these new digital learning environments are not just cost- and time-effective, but also pay off with increased productivity. Much of the writing I’ve done on this blog over the past year has focused on using MOOCs in the ways described in this article. But these represent only two of the seven ways companies have found to capitalize on what is not only a new educational technology, but an entirely new approach to organizational education and communication. In the final article in this series, we’ll look at three uses of MOOCs that definitely do not fit neatly within the bounds of traditional training: educating partners and customers, brand marketing, and collaboration and innovation. These three uses extend the reach of MOOCs way beyond a company’s relationship with its employees to influence how it interacts with its partners and its customers. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Megatrends in MOOCS: #5 Lifelong Learning2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?Using MOOCs: Partner and Customer RelationsUsing MOOCs: Finding and Onboarding New EmployeesMegatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate Universities(Visited 94 times, 1 visits today)

This is the last article in our series about how businesses are using MOOCs, as identified by Bersin by Deloitte. In previous articles, we looked at ways MOOCs are being used even before employees are hired, to build talent pipelines, as well as in more conventional training environments, such as for onboarding new employees, self-directed employee development, and workforce training. This final article examines three uses of MOOCs that go far beyond any standard conception of training: educating partners and customers, brand marketing, and collaboration and innovation. Educating Partners and Customers MOOCs are excellent tools for workplace education, but there is no rule that says that education needs to be limited to the workplace! Innovative organizations are using these tools to provide education to partners and customers as well. For example, on the customer side SAP has offered a couple of MOOCs for software developers. Last fall, the company ran a course on how to develop SAP mobile apps so companies could use the software to give employees secure access to data on their own devices. The goal of the course was to educate customers about what the software can do to enhance the increasingly popular BYOD (bring your own device) environments. SAP executive VP Bernd Welz said: "It seems we are really on the right track regarding how to best give people a greater understanding of SAP’s innovations." Businesses are also using MOOCs to educate members of their partner networks. For example, BloomNet is a wire florist retail network owned by 1-800-FLOWERS. The parent company has recently partnered with Udemy to offer courses on everything from finance and accounting to customer service and social media to BloomNet members, which are located around the world. These types of outreach simply weren’t possible before MOOCs came on the scene. Brand Marketing MOOCs thus far have not taken over higher education—only a few institutions accept the courses for credit and only a few students have taken advantage of the credit opportunities. But that hasn’t stopped colleges and universities from continuing to devote resources to developing MOOCs, which now number over 1200. If they aren’t actually using these courses for enrolled students, what benefit are schools getting from MOOCs? One answer is brand marketing. Now, you may argue that elite schools like Harvard and Stanford don’t really need to spend much time marketing themselves—their names are prestigious enough. But smaller, less well-known schools have been experimenting with MOOCs as a way to showcase and promote their traditional degree programs, a kind of try-before-you-buy model. Companies are doing this as well. For example, Bank of America has partnered with Khan Academy to launch the website Better Money Habits, where anyone can go to learn about budgeting, credit scores, savings, and more. Udacity has a full slate of industry partners who work with the company to develop course content and projects, which serve triple-duty as learning resources, customer education, and marketing materials. Just like in higher education, these partnerships represent powerful ways for businesses to gain exposure, reach new audiences, and create new markets for their brand. Collaboration and Innovation The final way companies are using MOOCs is to find innovative solutions to business problems through collaboration. For example, Coursolve is an organization that connects businesses with MOOCs to give students the opportunity to solve real-world problems, and businesses the chance to have their problems solved. Last year, nearly 100,000 students participated in the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business MOOC "Foundations of Business Strategy," offered on Coursera. Through the course, students had the opportunity to work on solving real problems from a list of companies that included GE, Johnson & Johnson, and Samsung, alongside many small businesses. For participating businesses, this model provides the opportunity to have ambitious, highly motivated learners working to solve their problems for free. Stanford’s NovoEd MOOC platform is entirely dedicated to real-world problem-solving through social learning and collaboration. Top students in the "Technology Entrepreneurship" course have the opportunity to work with Silicon Valley mentors and show their ideas to investors. Last fall, selected teams from "The Finance of Retirement and Pensions" MOOC competed for the opportunity to present their ideas for pension reform at a symposium held at Stanford this past January. Courses like these are not about learning knowledge and skills to be applied at some unspecified later date; they are about learning knowledge and skills that are immediately applicable to a problem at hand. As you have hopefully realized from this series of articles, MOOCs are much more than new models of training or new technology-enabled learning tools. They are exciting new digital learning environments, but this description doesn’t even come close to capturing their range of potential uses. After analyzing the ways companies are using MOOCs, it occurs to me that what really sets them apart from traditional training programs is that MOOCs are all about relationship-building. Instructor-led training is often focused squarely on delivering content, but the Internet has made all of the content we could ever possibly want available at our fingertips. MOOCs are different. They contain content, but their goal is what people can do with the content, and that doing takes place in the context of relationships: between companies and employees, companies and customers, companies and business students, and so on. MOOCs expand the concept of training and development from something employees sit through for a few hours every year to something entire organizations engage in every day. By embracing this concept now, companies can start building those learning relationships that will prove essential to their success in the future. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Using MOOCs: Self-Directed Development and Workforce…2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?How MOOCs Are Used in Workplace TrainingMegatrends in MOOCs: #6 More Social, More Collaborative13 Megatrends in MOOCs(Visited 41 times, 1 visits today)

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) like the ones offered by Coursera, edX, and Udacity have been around for about two years now, and over the past year or so, I have written about how they have evolved and the impact they have had on corporate training. Now, after several ups and downs, MOOCs are starting to find their place, and it turns out that place is much larger than could have been anticipated: MOOCs aren’t just disrupting how training is delivered; they are changing how companies interact with their employees and others on a much grander scale. As organizations continue to expand their use of new digital learning environments, we can identify some MOOC megatrends that are starting to shape up. I’ve touched on many of these trends before, but over the course of the next several weeks, we’ll look at each of these trends in turn, defining them, describing where we are in the process, and identifying challenges in their adoption. The goal for this series is to provide a complete picture of the place of MOOCs in training departments and in organizations as a whole. Here are the top 13 megatrends we are seeing in MOOCs: 1. Adoption at Corporate Universities MOOCs are starting to be adopted in corporate universities from tech companies to the manufacturing industry to the financial sector. This is part of an even larger trend in which online, connected digital learning environments are replacing traditional instructor-based and computer-based training formats. 2. Facilitating Learning Organizations In education, MOOCs have moved education out of formal classrooms and expanded the definition of "student" to include anyone with a computer, an Internet connection, and a desire to learn. In the same vein, MOOCs are redefining what training means to companies—training is no longer something that takes place just in seminars and workshops, but rather something that happens constantly, in many different ways, throughout entire organizations. 3. Updating the Competency-Based Training Model Companies in many industries are facing a skills gap, and they need a more efficient way to prepare employees for the workforce. This, along with digital learning environments, are driving a trend toward competency-based training, where the knowledge and skills an employee learns are being decoupled from the time that employee spends learning. In higher education, this has been referred to as the "unbundling of time." 4. Microlearning Paths At the same time as MOOCs are making the training world much bigger, they are in some sense making the scope of that training much smaller. Bite-sized learning and on-demand, employee-driven microlearning are facilitating the integration of training into on-the-job activities. 5. Lifelong Learning One of the biggest impacts MOOCs have had is to make education available to people of all ages. As a result, lifelong learning has become one of the biggest trends in recent years: in their spare time, people who once might have flipped on the television are now booting up their computers to learn and accessing learning resources on their mobile devices whenever they have a few minutes of downtime. Companies can capitalize on this lifelong learning trend both by offering engaging courses to the public and by recognizing their employees’ independent learning endeavors. 6. More Social, More Collaborative One of the biggest criticisms of MOOCs has been that learner-instructor interaction is completely absent and learner-learner interaction is inefficient at best. But this is starting to change. New learning platforms and models are being tested to enhance learning in MOOCs by making the courses more social and more collaborative. 7. Gamification Gamification and MOOCs started to become buzzwords in corporate training at about the same time. Gamification has revolutionized training in general by making it more engaging and more effective. As MOOCs and gamification converge, they will have an immense impact on workplace learning. 8. Mobile Learning As more people are using different types of mobile devices, mobile learning and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) training are being experimented with in many organizations. MOOCs are just starting to go mobile, and this likely represents the next big phase in their development. 9. Flipping the MOOC MOOCs are being used more and more often in flipped blended learning environments. Rather than all training taking place in-person or online, employees watch videos and do some activities online and then come together for practice, role play, problem-solving sessions, and other types of collaborative activities. 10. The Changing Role of the Instructor In training, as in education, the instructor is no longer just a human content-delivery system. With almost all of the world’s knowledge available at our fingertips, instructors are moving from being conveyors of knowledge to being curators and learning guides. This transition is redefining what it means to be a trainer in today’s learning organizations. 11. Alternative Credentials MOOCs and other digital learning environments are causing us to rethink our current model of credentialing, both for traditional students who are prospective employees and for employees participating in training. Verified certificates, digital badges, digital portfolios, knowledge graphs—these and other forms of alternative credentials are being tested in the job market and the workplace. 12. Training for Millennials Millennials and the generations that will come after them are digital natives whose educational, social, and professional lives take place largely online. These younger employees expect their training to be just as digitally connected as the rest of their lives. MOOCs provide one part of the answer for companies looking to attract and retain tomorrow’s top talent. 13. MOOCs as Relationship Builders MOOCs have not just moved training out of the classroom, but out of the company entirely. Today, organizations are experimenting with using MOOCs to build relationships with current employees, prospective employees, customers, and business partners alike. In this way, MOOCs are serving as a new form of educational social media. MOOCs are more than just new digital learning environments. As we work through this list, we will explore how MOOCs are redefining our entire cultural understanding of what education means and how companies can use this new understanding to inform and optimize their training and development programs, now and into the future. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Megatrends in MOOCs: #4 Microlearning PathsMegatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate UniversitiesHow MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILTMegatrends in MOOCS: #5 Lifelong Learning2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?(Visited 187 times, 1 visits today)

In this series, we’ll explore some major Megatrends in how and why MOOCs are being used in corporate training and development programs. The goal is to establish an overall picture of the current place of corporate MOOCs, where they are likely headed, and the challenges they may face on the way. In this first article, we’ll examine MOOCs within the context of the recent rise in corporate universities, which has been driven in part by some of the same forces behind the development of MOOCs. What is a corporate university and why have they become popular? Pepperdine University professor Mark Allen has defined a corporate university as "an educational entity that is a strategic tool designed to assist its parent organization in achieving its mission by conducting activities that cultivate individual and organizational learning, knowledge, and wisdom." Corporate universities are distinct from training departments and traditional universities in that they focus more on helping an organization achieve its mission rather than specifically on helping individual employees do their jobs better. Corporate universities have been in existence in the United States since 1956, when GE established the first one, Crotonville, to train executives in general management. Today, many companies have their own version of the corporate university, whether it is located on a physical campus or, as is happening more and more, online. In recent years, corporate universities are becoming more popular, for two main reasons: Companies are finding that they can greatly benefit from training at all levels that is tailored specifically to their organizational needs. Companies are finding that graduates of traditional universities don’t have the knowledge and skills the organizations require, especially when it comes to leadership positions. As Doug Guthrie wrote last year in Forbes, "Many corporations are creating their own internal universities because they feel business schools have failed at training the managers and leaders needed to run their companies." How do MOOCs fit in with corporate universities? In many ways, the reasons corporate universities have expanded are some of the same reasons that MOOCs are becoming so popular, especially for a growing crop of non-traditional learners: the courses provide a way for learners to get the personalized education they need to succeed in their job and advance their career, and both students and employers are finding that traditional colleges and universities are not satisfactorily preparing graduates to enter the workforce. Recently in corporate universities, the dominant model of education has started to change. Moving away from instructor-led training and traditional computer-based training, companies are starting to transition toward more connected digital learning environments, including MOOCs. One of the biggest stories of the past year was the announcement in November that multinational steel manufacturing company Tenaris would partner with MOOC provider edX to expand the firm’s training and education offerings to its 27,000 employees worldwide. Under the agreement, Tenaris can both develop MOOCs on the edX platform and license courses developed by others. MOOCs can provide several advantages for corporate universities: Collaborative company-wide training. The courses are a way for companies to provide training to employees not only across departments but also around the world. This expands the reach of the corporate university and creates an organization-wide atmosphere of collaboration that is rarely present in either traditional instructor-led or computer-based training. Both in-house and licensed courses. Like Tenaris, companies can both develop their own MOOCs for organization-specific training and use MOOCs developed by others for more general training needs. Licensing courses is significantly less expensive, both in money and in time, than developing them. Training integrated into work. Through on-demand access to learning resources and personal learning networks, MOOCs integrate learning into the regular course of work. Rather than taking time away from work to attend courses at a corporate university (which is often physically located in a different place), employees have access to the knowledge resources they need exactly when they need them. In this way, MOOCs make workplace learning less like sitting in a classroom and more like just doing your job. Less expense, greater flexibility. MOOC platforms are both less expensive and more flexible than many traditional learning management systems (LMSs). They also allow companies to more easily incorporate learning resources from across the Internet into their courses. Overall, MOOCs are powerful tools for corporate universities to have in their training toolbox. What are some challenges to the adoption of MOOCs in corporate universities? It’s difficult to know exactly how many companies are using or considering using MOOCs in their corporate universities. At this point, we can identify at least three main challenges to their adoption: Lack of knowledge about MOOCs. Many business leaders aren’t familiar enough with MOOCs and are wary of adopting a model that is largely untested. This is changing with time, as many companies are currently facing a widening skills gap, and therefore are becoming more willing to experiment with methods that hold promise as ways to train employees more quickly and more effectively. Limited availability of platforms. Until recently, companies didn’t have much choice when it came to MOOC platforms. Coursera and edX, the two major ones, targeted mainly academic institutions. Today, there are more platforms available, including mooc.org, which is a partnership between Google and edX to expand the edX platform to many types of organizations. Many traditional LMSs are also enhancing their systems to support MOOCs. Limited learner tracking. Learning in MOOCs takes many forms, from the traditional video-watching and assessment-taking to curating shared resources and interacting on social media. Big data is just starting to be incorporated into MOOCs in a meaningful way and new programs, like Tin Can (the Experience API), have huge potential for allowing organizations to track all of their employees’ learning activities. More and more, corporate universities are moving their programs online to benefit from the increased access, efficiency, and collaborative opportunities a virtual learning environment can provide. MOOCs are the next phase of that development, representing the possibility of providing engaging, effective training to all of a company’s employees, regardless of whether they are located around the globe. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:13 Megatrends in MOOCs2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?Megatrends in MOOCs: #2 Facilitating Learning OrganizationsMegatrends in MOOCS: #5 Lifelong LearningMOOCs: From the Classroom to the Conference Room(Visited 164 times, 3 visits today)

The Internet has had profound impacts on education and training—not just on the practical aspects of how it is done, but on something much more fundamental: it has changed our core conceptions of what it means to teach and to learn. By far, one of the largest disruptive effects of MOOCs and other digital learning environments has been to move education out of classrooms and into the real world. When you can learn anytime, not just from 6 to 8 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays for example, learning becomes an integrated part of your life. Not something you do at a special time and in a special place, but something you can engage in wherever you are and, most importantly, whenever you need to. This new model of learning is turning out to have huge positive implications for organizations that are willing to embrace it. As we saw in the previous post on MOOCs in corporate universities, the ultimate goal of employee training and development isn’t just to help individual employees do their jobs better, but to help the organization as a whole achieve its strategic objectives. Today, with business moving and things changing so quickly, the only way for a company to even keep pace with the competition is by ensuring that its employees at all levels are constantly updating their knowledge and skills, challenging the status quo, and looking for new solutions to problems. In other words, it needs to be a learning organization. In 2012, Josh Bersin identified five key factors in building a learning organization. Although MOOCs as we know them today didn’t even exist when he wrote the article, the courses provide effective ways for companies to achieve all five factors. 1. Remember that corporate learning is "informal" and HR doesn’t own it. Training and development programs are often overly formalized, though business leaders, HR managers, trainers, and employees alike all know that the most effective learning takes place on the job, not in the classroom. Bersin writes: "Our research shows that companies which adopt ‘formalized informal learning’ programs (like coaching, on-demand training, and performance support tools) outperform those that focus on formal training by 3 to 1. In these companies, the corporate training team doesn’t just train people, it puts in place content and programs to help employees quickly learn on the job. This means developing training in small, easy-to-use chunks of content and making it easy to find as needed." These elements—on-demand training, performance support, on-the-job learning, bite-sized content—are some of the main advantages offered by MOOCs. 2. Promote and reward expertise. Workers are becoming more specialized, and learning organizations are those that recognize and reward the development of expertise. MOOCs offer opportunities for workers to enhance their skills and become increasingly specialized by providing flexible, engaging learning activities that employees can engage in on their own time, or even just while waiting for the elevator. 3. Unleash the power of experts. Too often in traditional instructor-led and computer-based training, subject matter experts are tapped to develop or vet content, but then their participation is over: the actual training is delivered by an instructor who may be an expert in training, but isn’t an authority on the particular topic. MOOCs allow employees throughout an organization to learn directly from experts in a couple of ways. First, the experts can actually teach the courses, or at least specific modules within a course. Second, they can participate in the social aspect of the course, by moderating discussion boards, hosting social media conversations, participating in Q&A sessions, and so on. Through networking in MOOCs, a company’s experts can actively contribute to its organizational knowledge base in a way not possible in traditional training. 4. Demonstrate the value of formal training. MOOCs won’t necessarily replace all of the formal training in an organization, but they can provide a platform to demonstrate its value. Bersin notes that those in leadership positions need to promote training opportunities and "help people make time to learn." In companies with a lot of formal training available, MOOCs can offer an opportunity for employees to try out courses and learning pathways before deciding whether they want to pursue them in earnest. 5. Allow people to make mistakes. Organizational learning can only take place when people make mistakes. That doesn’t mean getting multiple-choice questions wrong; it means making mistakes on meaningful assessments. By using real-world problems and facilitating the development of organizational learning networks, MOOCs provide an environment where people can fail safely and then have access to learning resources, including colleagues and experts, to learn from those failures. Challenges to MOOCs and learning organizations One of the main challenges of adopting a culture of organizational learning is the same as one of the main challenges to using MOOCs in corporate training: the willingness to give up control. In instructor-led and computer-based training, the trainers have complete control over what content is delivered and how. This is not entirely true in MOOCs—although the organization can control the content of the core resources, the real learning takes place in the networks and interactions among people. This can be difficult for some companies, but as Bersin’s research shows, businesses that are willing to take this path find themselves amply rewarded via improved organizational performance. To compete today, businesses need not just to provide training, but to adopt a new philosophy of learning. MOOCs can provide the technological and social framework to facilitate this transition and create a culture of organizational learning. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Megatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate Universities13 Megatrends in MOOCsMegatrends in MOOCs: #4 Microlearning PathsMOOCs and Performance SupportMegatrends in MOOCs: #10 The Changing Role of the Instructor(Visited 112 times, 1 visits today)

Over the past several years, the educational requirements for jobs have been increasing. According to a study by Georgetown University, 63 percent of all jobs will require a bachelor’s degree by the year 2018. However, although students have been scrambling to get their degrees, employers are experiencing an unprecedented gap between the skills they need and the skills their employees have. In a survey conducted last year by Adecco, 92 percent of U.S. senior executives reported a workforce skills gap. The major areas of weakness were soft skills, technical skills, leadership, and computer skills, and these gaps are negatively impacting U.S. businesses, particularly in terms of their ability to obtain investment. The problem can be traced to inadequacies in traditional education as well as a lack of sufficient workforce training. Nearly 60 percent of survey respondents reported that U.S. colleges and universities are not adequately preparing students for the workforce, and although 89 percent believe corporate apprenticeships or training programs could be a solution, more than 4 in 10 said that cost was a major impediment to developing in-house training programs. The apparent disconnect between what students are learning in their degree programs and the skills that employers require has sparked interest in competency-based training programs, as well as digital learning environments like MOOCs that can greatly facilitate this training. Businesses need employees with skills, and they need them now. Why use competency-based training? The dominant model in education and training is based on the idea that learning is somehow related to how many hours someone spends in class. But this equation simply isn’t valid, especially in a work environment, where research has shown that because of inefficient, ineffective training people forget 90 percent of what they learn within a year. Competency-based training models unbundle the time spent learning from what is actually learned—if learners already have the knowledge and skills, they move on; if they need more time, they continue engaging with the material until they get it. The goal of competency-based training is learning mastery, not just getting your hours in. HR consultancy firm The Competency Group (TCG) describes competency-based training as "training designed to deliver performance." In this model, learners are assessed by their ability to apply what they learn in meaningful ways. TCG identifies the following four main advantages of competency-based training: It is cost-effective, goal-oriented, and productive. It targets specific training needs. It standardizes performance. It improves the quality of products and services. How can competency-based training be implemented in MOOCs? MOOCs can help companies address the skills gap, more quickly and effectively than traditional instructor-led training, and without them necessarily having to invest in full in-house program development. Here are a few models companies can adopt to use MOOCs for competency-based training: Verified certificate programs. All of the major MOOC providers have verified certificate programs. They also have multi-course sequences, for example Coursera’s Specializations, that culminate in a capstone project. Companies can award training credit to employees who earn verified certificates and complete the projects. The cost of this method ranges from about $40 for a single course to a couple of hundred dollars for a full course sequence. Direct assessment. Companies can recommend courses from the major MOOC providers or license courses from a third-party developer and then design their own competency-based assessments. This would still come at a fraction of the cost of developing in-house training programs. MOOC development. Using an LMS platforms, companies can develop their own competency-based MOOC training programs. These courses could take the form of full MOOCs or of individual learning modules. In all of these models, employees can take the courses on their own schedule and at their own pace, and then demonstrate their learning in a way determined by the organization. This minimizes the time they spend learning what they already know (which often constitutes a large part of instructor-led training), as well as provides opportunities for them to apply what they learn. Challenges to implementing competency-based training via MOOCs Currently, one main challenge to this model is how to credential learning in MOOCs. In traditional instructor-led and even computer-based training, the "credential" is based on attendance, not performance. In competency-based training, performance is everything. At present, there are two main methods of credentialing learning in MOOCs. One option is verified certificates, which are usually contingent on passing a proctored exam. The other major option, which is growing in popularity, is digital badges. Digital badges are microlearning credentials that unlike credits and degrees are directly tied to particular competencies. The biggest player in the digital badge arena is Mozilla Open Badges—using this open-source platform, organizations can develop and issue badges to individuals who have demonstrated specific skills or pieces of knowledge. Businesses are quickly learning the value of having credentials that reflect competencies rather than hours—last year the Mozilla Open Badges project grew from 50 participating organizations to 265 and the number of badges issued went from 50,000 to 235,100. A second big challenge is simply a lack of understanding about both MOOCs and the competency-based training model. Traditional training isn’t built around competencies, and although MOOCs are becoming more widely recognized, many organizations and trainers still look at them somewhat suspiciously. But with the widening skills gap, more companies are embracing alternative training models. Companies don’t need employees who have spent a certain number of hours daydreaming in a seminar or sitting in front of a computer terminal hitting the "Next" button. What they do need is employees who have mastered defined sets of knowledge and skills and are able to demonstrate that mastery on the job. MOOCs are digital learning environments where employees can learn, practice, and apply new knowledge and skills in ways that will have a positive, immediate impact on their job performance. This provides a powerful solution for firms to address their skills gap now, before they fall even further behind. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Megatrends in MOOCs: #11 Alternative Credentials13 Megatrends in MOOCs2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?MOOCs to Bridge the Workplace Skills GapMegatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate Universities(Visited 129 times, 1 visits today)

In the previous article, we explored how corporate training is moving away from seat-time and toward competencies. This larger picture here is not just a shift in how learning is measured, but an entire re-visioning of what effective training looks like. Standard models of training, whether they are instructor-led or computer-based, look like very much like college classes—employees are taken out of their normal work environments to spend four or eight or forty hours "learning" things they may or may not encounter in their day-to-day jobs, and likely won’t remember if they do. But standard models are quickly being swept out the door by training methods that take place not outside of the normal work environment, but right smack in the middle of it. This has resulted in a new interest in microlearning, which is essentially any type of learning done in very short bursts. Digital learning environments, like MOOCs, can provide frameworks for a wide variety of microlearning activities. What is microlearning and why should we use it Microlearning has become a bit of a buzzword lately in the training and development world, but it is one that is not well defined. The main reason for this is that microlearning is not one single thing. In the context of training, microlearning often refers to short (10 minutes or less) videos and tutorials, quick quizzes, and other features of standard courses, just compressed into a smaller package. But it is much more than that—every time employees refer to a job aid, Google the answer to a question, or ask a colleague for advice, they are doing self-directed microlearning. When we conceptualize microlearning in this way, we realize that much of workplace education takes place not in classes at all, but in the course of regular work activities. The question isn’t so much "Why should we use microlearning?" (employees are already using it—all of the time) as "Why should we formalize microlearning into training and development programs?" Here are several reasons this model of learning is becoming more widely accepted: It brings learning to employees while they are performing their daily activities, rather than requiring them to leave their work environments. This helps companies develop into learning organizations. Microlearning resources can be made available on-demand to facilitate just-in-time learning. Microlearning and mobile learning go hand in hand. People are using their mobile devices more and more in the workplace, for communication as well as for finding answers to questions. Knowledge is changing faster than ever before—a concept or process an employee learns today is likely to be obsolete a few months down the road. Microlearning allows employees to immediately access the knowledge they need, rather than having to wait until the next designated training day. In addition, training departments don’t have to redevelop full courses every time something changes; they can just release a new video or new performance support tool. Motivation is high. Microlearning is primarily a pull method: learners access the resources they need when the need them, rather than just acting as passive recipients of knowledge that they may or may not recognize as useful. Microlearning isn’t necessarily appropriate for all aspects of workplace education, but it is highly advantageous in environments in which people don’t have a lot of concentrated time to devote to their training, for process reinforcement, and for spaced repetition, among others. How do MOOCs facilitate microlearning? In a post last fall, I wrote that MOOCs have changed what learners expect from their educational experiences and that the technologies that support MOOCs can also support microlearning. Now, as MOOCs have expanded, in both size and format (i.e., MOOCs have evolved and now the acronym encompasses many different types of courses), they offer several options for training departments to implement microlearning paths within an organization. Here are some of them: Short videos and other learning resources. This is the most popular form of microlearning and the one featured in most MOOCs. Five- to ten-minute videos can be used for everything from explaining a concept to providing the answers to frequently asked questions, running short software tutorials, and introducing new products. Other microlearning resources, like job aids, documents, podcasts, and even short interactive elearning activities, can also be housed within a MOOC. Spaced repetition and practice activities. While learners are working their way through a MOOC, mini activities like assessment questions, short quizzes, and more can be delivered periodically to employees’ computers or mobile devices, enhancing learning through spaced repetition and practice. Communication and collaboration platforms. MOOCs can incorporate discussion boards, Q&A sessions, Twitter feeds, and other social media tools to provide opportunities for employees across organizations to communicate and collaborate. This helps employees expand their personal learning networks, giving them a broader range of experts to consult when necessary. Credentials and gamification. We’ll talk about this in a later post in this megatrends series, but microlearning presents an ideal environment for gamification. Employees in MOOCs can work to earn points and digital badges, and competition between individuals and teams can be used to foster motivation for training. There are many other ways microlearning paths can be formalized via MOOCs. The key considerations are that the learning activities should be short, available on-demand, and immediately relevant to a job task. Challenges to using MOOCs and microlearning in corporate training The biggest challenge to bringing MOOCs and microlearning together in corporate training and development is that this path requires a complete reimagining of what workplace learning looks like as well as some sophisticated technology to support it. However, both of these issues are quickly becoming moot. Companies are moving away from traditional models and more toward competency-based training and performance support, and learning management systems are evolving to better support both MOOCs and mobile learning. In a Corporate Learning Network post just last month, Chris Appleton described the advantages of adopting microlearning like this: "In a corporate setting, learning solutions must be dynamic, adaptable, scalable, and available on demand whenever and wherever they are needed. They must be surgically precise and cater to individual need no matter the function, background, and learning preference of the professional audience. Companies will often create large-scale programs for some of their most important initiatives….The investment of time and money to run these massive programs can become so unwieldy that they are no longer agile and able to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the business…Offering microlearning solutions may effectively eliminate these barriers while delivering the knowledge and skills needed for successful role performance." That last part is key: "delivering the knowledge and skills needed for successful role performance." This is, after all, the goal of all organizational training and development. Combining MOOCs with microlearning provides a powerful method for achieving this goal. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:MOOCs and Microlearning13 Megatrends in MOOCsMOOCs and Performance SupportMegatrends in MOOCs: #3 Updating the Competency-Based…Megatrends in MOOCs: #13 MOOCs as Relationship Builders(Visited 135 times, 1 visits today)

When Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Coursera’s Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, and other education innovators decided to start putting courses from top universities online, for free, their idea was to make education accessible to everyone who wanted it, regardless of socioeconomic status, country, and other barriers to getting a traditional college education. What they may not have anticipated was that MOOCs would be such a huge hit with people who already had that traditional education—those already in the workforce who had gotten their degrees five, ten, or even twenty or more years earlier. But that’s exactly what has happened. MOOCs have spurred a major trend toward lifelong learning. Companies are now experimenting with ways to harness their employees’ desire to learn to help their organizations succeed. The lifelong learning trend There have been several studies of who takes MOOCs, mostly based on student surveys. The biggest one to date has been a University of Pennsylvania study released last fall that analyzed the demographics of MOOC students from 32 of the institution’s courses available on Coursera. What they found, which echoes other reports of this type, is that a typical MOOC student is older than traditional college age, already has at least a bachelor’s degree, and is already employed. Two of the most common reasons students give for taking MOOCs is to advance in their current career and to prepare to make a career change. In other words, people who already have a degree and are already in the workforce are taking charge of their own professional development and participating in courses on their own time and outside of their company’s training programs. This is a pretty major finding. Corporate training and development programs don’t usually inspire very much excitement, and these same people are probably daydreaming through their formal training and then forgetting everything immediately afterward. The MOOC data suggest that employees want to learn, not just to sleep through training seminars. They want to get better at their jobs and train for new ones—but traditional training and education programs just aren’t doing the trick. This trend toward lifelong learning is being driven on the student side by the same force behind the current push toward more training on the employer side: the skills gap. Both recent graduates and seasoned employees are realizing that in this time of incredibly fast change on nearly every front, the skills they learned even just a few years ago are now obsolete. In order to succeed in their current jobs, as well as be competitive in the future, learners are using MOOCs to update and enhance their professional skills. How companies can capitalize on this trend Companies can take advantage of the lifelong learning trend mainly by supporting and recognizing their employees’ learning initiatives. In a recent article for Entrepreneur, Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard identified several tactics businesses can use to create a culture of learning. Here is how these tactics can be used to support employee learning in MOOCs: Weekly lunch and learns. Once a week, buy lunch and have an employee present what he or she is learning in a MOOC. This can help spread knowledge and also create an environment where learning is seen as a priority. Training budgets and tuition reimbursement and recognition programs. MOOCs are free to take, but verified certificates cost anywhere between about $40 and $100. Reimburse your employees for these expenses—this practice will both encourage employees to take courses and demonstrate that you support their professional development. Plus, it is a lot cheaper than developing and running an in-house course! Set specific learning goals. Encourage employees to set learning goals every quarter and then check in with them on how they are doing. For example, managers can monitor their employees’ progress through MOOCs and provide support when necessary. Training departments can track learning efforts to identify and support organization-wide learning efforts. Distribute books to read. For MOOCs, this tactic can be changed to "vet and recommend courses." There are hundreds of MOOCs available—training departments can support employee learning efforts by vetting courses and making specific recommendations. Acknowledge the results. This is the big one—don’t let your employees’ training efforts go unnoticed. Treat MOOC accomplishments the way you would any other training program. Here’s another tactic Skonnard didn’t address: provide onsite support for MOOC students. If you recommend a course to your employees, organize group meeting, either in-person or online, where those who choose to take the course can connect. Companies can also benefit from the lifelong learning trend by offering their own MOOCs as ways to both identify potential future employees as well as build relationships with partners and customers. Challenges for MOOCs and lifelong learning in training environments The biggest challenge for organizations in incorporating MOOCs and the recognition of lifelong learning into their training as described in this article is the "not invented here" syndrome. Many companies (and many T&D departments) have a hard time accepting courses and materials developed by third parties; they want to retain strict control over employee development. But with how rapidly knowledge and technology are changing, and the huge increase in skills necessary for businesses just to keep up, this attitude is a dangerous one and will result in your company falling behind. You can always supplement MOOCs with your own in-house training and materials, but for many standard courses, it probably isn’t necessary. Work with your employees and provide the support they need to manage their own career development—the results you see will likely be better than any you could have predicted. MOOCs are challenging organizations to thinking about training differently. Realize that your employees are probably already taking them (or engaging in other self-directed professional development) and find ways to support those personal lifelong learning initiatives. Otherwise, you might find your employees taking their new knowledge and skills to a company that does provide such support and recognition. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:13 Megatrends in MOOCsUsing MOOCs: Self-Directed Development and Workforce…Megatrends in MOOCs: #11 Alternative CredentialsMOOCs: Personal Initiative and Professional DevelopmentMegatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate Universities(Visited 238 times, 1 visits today)

If you were asked to name the top three current trends in business in general, my guess is that "social" would make the list. To say that social media has flipped the business world on its head isn’t an understatement—from product development to marketing to customer relations and beyond, tools like Facebook and Twitter have completely changed how companies function. But social media platforms are just technologies that have enabled a more fundamental transformation, and not just in business: today communication, collaboration, and social interaction take center stage in our lives, in our work, and in our learning. We’ve all heard that most of learning is informal, and much of informal learning is social (coaching/mentoring, talking in the break room, chatting online, etc.). Estimates about how much of workplace learning happens in this way range from 70 up to a whopping 95 percent. A 2010 survey by The CARA Group found that corporate leaders and trainers recognize the importance of informal learning and the role social media plays in it. They found that: 98 percent of corporate leaders and trainers agree that social media is changing how employees learn. 81 percent agree that social media is valuable for employee learning. 90 percent said they encourage or support informal learning. Digital learning environments like MOOCs can provide the best of both worlds—social learning tools integrated into formal learning programs. Here we’ll review the social development of MOOCs and look at some of the new platforms and models that are being tested to make the courses even more social and more collaborative. The social development of MOOCs One of the biggest criticisms of MOOCs over the past two years has been that they are not social. To hear the critics tell it, MOOC students are isolated learners who don’t interact with their instructors or other learners at all; thus, they miss the most important aspect of learning—that which comes from discussion, debate, and collaboration. This isn’t entirely false, but it isn’t entirely true either, so let’s take a moment to address this criticism. In their short history, MOOCs have already gone through a couple of iterations. The first MOOC was run in 2008 by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, and it was based on a connectivist model of learning. The goal of the course was not so much for students to master the content as it was for them to develop personal learning networks. To that end, Siemens and Downes provided a structure and learning resources, which were distributed across the web, but learners could engage with those resources and with one another, in any way they chose. This original vision for MOOCs less formal, but ultra-social. When Udacity, Coursera, and edX debuted, they provided a different type of MOOC—one that looked more like a traditional online course, just on a massive scale. These MOOCs highly were highly formal, but the social part was optional. The courses were housed within a learning management system and even though discussion boards were available, learners could, if they wanted to, complete them without ever interacting with the instructors or the other students. This is the model that critics claim doesn’t provide the social and collaborative learning opportunities that are necessary for meaningful learning. But MOOCs didn’t stop evolving there, and now practically all MOOC providers and instructors are experimenting with different ways to increase the socialness of MOOCs. Many MOOCs now have Facebook pages and Twitter conversations in addition to the standard discussion boards. Some educators are experimenting with ways to up the ante even more. The best current models seek to incorporate social and collaborative learning into a more structured, formal environment. They are going beyond just using discussion boards and social media to providing new tools and environments where learners can network and engage with one another in various ways. Here are some current initiatives: A HarvardX course on "Innovating in Health Care" is experimenting with a new way to match students for course projects. To improve opportunities for interaction and collaboration, this course is using Project Lever, which course instructor and application developer Regina Herzlinger described to Bloomberg Businessweek as a "sort of EHarmony for building businesses." Students in the course are using the application to divide into groups to write a business plan. Companies could use this model to match employees for project teams, even if those employees are located in different offices or countries. Professors at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Utah are currently running a joint collaborative online journalism course. Students at the two campuses are using the same learning resources, taking the courses together, and interacting with one another, but they also meet in groups on their respective campuses with individual instructors. Organizations spread across the country, or even across the globe, can use this model to provide training that is both standardized and personalized to meet learners’ needs. NovoEd is an entire MOOC platform built around the idea of collaborative, project-based learning. Assessments in these courses are all real-world projects that learners work on with groups made up of students from around the world. Businesses can use a platform like this to connect employees in both training programs and project teams. Challenges to implementing social MOOCs in organizations The technology to make MOOCs maximally social and collaborative is out there, and much of it is freely available. Thus, the biggest obstacle to organizations getting the most social bang for their buck is attitude. While most organizations have adopted social tools as an essential way to connect with customers, many are still wary of encouraging social media use among employees. But with the rise of the BYOD (bring your own device) culture, this obstacle is becoming less prohibitive. In many organizations, the training department may also need to adopt a different perspective. Rather than thinking of training as a process of delivering content, trainers need to switch gears to providing tools to support social learning among employees. MOOCs can be isolated learning experiences, but they certainly don’t have to be. Web 2.0 has, above all, revolutionized how we communicate, and MOOCs can capitalize on these same tools to massively boost workplace learning’s social and collaborative quotient. The tools are available and their impact on training can be significant. For more information, check out this article on how to use social media in a corporate classroom. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 1How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 1How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 2How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 2How to MOOC: Technology-Enabled Learning Tools, Part 2(Visited 90 times, 1 visits today)

As digital learning environments, MOOCs are incredibly flexible—they can be used for fully online courses, in hybrid courses, as supplementary materials, and more. One of the offshoots of the growth of MOOCs has been an interest in "flipped classes," which is commonly conceived as a reversal of in-class time and out-of-class time. For example, the typical formula for flipping a class is to assign video lectures as homework and use in-class time for collaborative activities including role play and problem-solving. Here, we’ll look briefly at how to use MOOCs to flip a corporate classroom in this way as well as explore a broader perspective on what it means to flip an online course. Flipping class time When people talk about "flipping" a classroom, what they are usually talking about is a way of integrating technology into a traditional course to make it a hybrid course. In this model, learners watch online videos at home and then come to class ready to participate in hands-on activities along with their fellow students. In essence, this method of flipping the classroom is just a way of reorganizing training to maximize face time and time spent on applied learning. In an article for the Association for Talent Development, Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams describe how flipped learning is being explored in businesses as diverse as the nuclear power industry to a hair-care products company. The MOOC format is a pretty obvious fit for this type of flipping. The MOOC itself can be used to deliver the content, and the learners can then meet in person to do applied activities, like simulations. In this model, the MOOC provides the framework for what is essentially a hybrid course. The main advantages of this "traditional" flipping (if we can call it that) include improved learning outcomes and less demand on trainers, who need to create and deliver the content only once (i.e., record a video lecture or tutorial, which can then be reused in future sessions of the course). This model has recently started to take off in workforce education as organizations look for new ways to provide the necessary training while making their training budgets stretch farther. But there is another vision of flipping—one that will become even more relevant as more classes move not just to a hybrid format, but fully online. Flipping class focus In article titled "Can you flip an online class?" Barbi Honeycutt and Sarah Glova suggest that flipping can successfully be used in an online course as well. They argue that flipping should not be just about time spent on different activities. They write: "The flipped classroom model can help us design more interactive and engaging online experiences, and online classes can help us expand on what it means to flip. Certainly there is something to learn by combining these two conversations." What they suggest is that flipping the entire focus of the course. For online courses, they define "flipping" as "shifting the focus from the instructor to the students." This way, rather than just focusing on what happens in versus out of class, "we focus on what are students doing to construct knowledge, connect with others, and engage in higher levels of critical thinking and analysis….The real flip is not about where activities take place—it’s about flipping the focus from you to your students." Their suggestions for how to do this include using a course-specific hashtag so learners can share resources and developing assignments that encourage self-reflection and analysis. MOOCs are also an ideal framework for this second type of flipping. In theory, any type of activity, assignment, or interaction possible in a traditional online course can be adapted into a MOOC. In addition, by using social networking sites and social media platforms, learners in a MOOC can build personal learning networks; create, curate, and share resources; and participate in reflective activities, such as blogging. This second perspective on flipping is broadly applicable to any training course, whether online or off, and represents a vast improvement over the "sage-on-the-stage" content-delivery model that gives corporate training its reputation of being impossible to stay awake for. Challenges to flipping a MOOC The biggest obstacle to flipping a MOOC depends on which type of flipping you are talking about. For the in-versus-out-of-class definition, the main challenge is getting learners to actually engage with the learning materials (i.e., watch the videos) on their own time. When Steven Blank experimented with using his Lean LaunchPad MOOC to flip a traditional course, he found that more than half of the students didn’t actually watch the videos at home. To increase engagement, he started tracking who was watching the videos and required his students to submit questions, which he used for a basis for class discussion. With the integration of big data into MOOCs, tracking what learners are doing is becoming standard. For the second type of flip, the main challenge is that for some training departments, focusing on the learners rather than the trainer is a pretty significant departure from normal. But, as for several of the trends we’ve explored in this series, ideas about what training is and what it should be are changing. Learners are demanding more engaging, active, and relevant learning experiences, and effective L&D departments need to adapt to these new demands. Flipping the classroom is associated with both better engagement and better learning outcomes, but just exchanging seat time for home time isn’t enough. The MOOC format, which is flexible and allows for both active learning and social/collaborative learning, can facilitate an even more profound switch so that the learners themselves become the focus of the training experience. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:MOOCs: Flipping the Corporate Classroom13 Megatrends in MOOCsNew MOOC Environments: Distributed Open Collaborative…Megatrends in MOOCs: #6 More Social, More CollaborativeMOOCs and Performance Support(Visited 191 times, 1 visits today)

In this series so far, we’ve explored how massive open online courses (MOOCs) are changing the nature of learning. We’ve looked at how they can help foster learning organizations, promote lifelong learning, facilitate collaboration, and even provide just-in-time performance support. But one of the biggest transformations that has been brought about by MOOCs, online learning, and the Internet in general is a shift in what means to teach a class. The role of the instructor is changing, and while the initial reaction has been one of shock and fear (educators are afraid of losing their jobs), the truth is that this shift is actually very good news—for companies, for employees, and for trainers. Here’s why: If your company is anything like almost every other organization, you have probably noticed a skills gap between what job applicants and employees can do and the skills you need them to have. Likely, you are observing the biggest skills gaps in the areas of computer and mathematical occupations, architecture and engineering occupations, and management occupations. And these gaps are costing you money—a recent CareerBuilder survey showed that "on average, a company loses more than $14,000 for every job that stays vacant for three months or longer" and "that one in six companies loses $25,000 or more." The answer to bridging these gaps is training, but while 80% of college graduates expect that they will be provided with formal training on their first job, only 48% actually receive that training. Clearly more training is needed…and fast. The new role of the instructor in MOOCs means that companies can train more people, more quickly and more effectively, than ever before. The 21st century trainer The 20th century trainer had two main roles: content creation and content delivery. Yes, ideally trainers would serve as facilitators, providing meaningful learning experiences and engaging learners. But be honest, with 100 PowerPoint slides to get through in two hours, how often did that actually happen? Corporate training didn’t get its snooze-worthy reputation from being meaningful and engaging. MOOCs and other digital learning tools have redefined instruction for the 21st century. They allow trainers to spend much less time on content creation and practically no time at all on content delivery, which means that they can spend more time guiding employees through the training, assess their progress, provide remediation when necessary, and overall ensure that the training is resulting in real, meaningful, and actionable learning. Let’s look at how MOOCs have transformed the two main roles of the 20th century trainer: Content creation. In the past, trainers would spend a good deal of time creating content from scratch. Now, at least for more general courses, like Communications Skills, Microsoft Excel 101, and How to Negotiate, content creation is no longer necessary. There are plenty of excellent resources available online, and many of them are free. Rather than creating content, trainers can now spend their time curating it. Not only does curation take less time than developing a course from scratch, but when something in the content needs to be changed (as it so often does), it’s usually a fairly simple matter to find a new online resource and upload it into a MOOC. Content delivery. MOOCs have nearly eliminated this role altogether. When developing MOOCs from scratch, trainers may make videos and tutorials, and put together documents and activities, but then the content is delivered online. The advantage of this is that the marginal cost, in terms of both time and money, of delivering that content to additional learners is functionally zero. Just because trainers’ role in creating and delivering content is changing doesn’t mean half your T&D department is out on the street. Writing for The Evolllution, Kyle Peck from Penn State University, had this to say about the new role of instructors (he’s writing about the higher education space, but his message is equally applicable to corporate training): "Technologies will re-place higher education. I didn’t say ‘replace’; I said ‘re-place’….People can learn without being taught. Technologies can do a better job of conveying information and developing understanding than can lectures….Knowledge is necessary, but not sufficient, for success. Employers are looking for people who can and will do things and do them well….the role of the teacher changes, becoming more focused on the development of skills and attributes and on high-quality assessment and comprehensive feedback, rather than on the dissemination of content." In a corporate environment, the message is essentially the same—moving to MOOCs means that trainers can focus on helping employees to acquire the knowledge and skills they need to do their jobs. Challenges to the changing role of the instructor As with some of the other topics we’ve explored in this series, the main challenge to this trend is changing the attitudes of organizations and of trainers. On the organizational side, moving to a digital environment doesn’t mean that trainers are unnecessary. As Jessica Miller-Merrell wrote on the eSkill blog, "There will always be a need for someone who can interface with employees directly, think strategically about what works best for them, and determine what the training needs are. It’s true that the value proposition for corporate trainers may change, but it won’t go away." On the trainer side, T&D departments need to embrace their new roles, which may be a challenge for some. They also need to let go of the "not invented here" ideology and be willing to use the many excellent resources that are available online. There is no question that the role of the trainer is changing, and that there is a good deal of resistance to this change. But organizations and trainers that embrace the shift will find that when trainers need to do less creating and delivering, they can do more engaging and facilitating, which will lead to more effective training. It’s a win-win-win situation (companies-trainers-learners). Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Megatrends in MOOCs: #2 Facilitating Learning OrganizationsKey Factors in MOOC Success, Part 2MOOCs and Performance Support13 Megatrends in MOOCsMegatrends in MOOCs: #4 Microlearning Paths(Visited 177 times, 1 visits today)

New forms of education require new types of credentials. But what does it mean when job applicants put digital badges on their resumes or when an employee earns a verified certificate from a free online course? One of the biggest opportunities for MOOCs and other digital learning environments has been in the development of alternative credentials, which may turn out to be even better than traditional degrees at highlighting one’s knowledge and skills. Why do we need alternative credentials? As you are probably well aware, employers in general are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with traditional higher education. This stems from the fact that most business leaders don’t feel that recent graduates are adequately prepared for the workforce: in a recent Gallup survey, only 11% of business leaders strongly agreed that colleges and universities are doing a good job preparing students for work. Only 11%! Most companies want to hire degree holders, and indeed the number of jobs requiring a degree is expected to hit 60% by 2018, but hiring managers are becoming less and less certain about what those degrees actually mean. To solve this problem, alternative credentials are being developed that are more closely tied to specific knowledge and demonstrable skills. What alternative credentials are available? There are basically two types of alternative credentials: non-degree credentials offered by degree-granting institutions (i.e., professional diplomas and certificates) and new credentials that are outside of the traditional higher education system altogether. This article focuses on the latter, as they are the types of credentials that are being developed in conjunction with MOOCs. At the moment most MOOCs, along with other digital learning environments, are unaccredited. So, if your employees take them, how do you know what they’ve learned? And how do you give credit for the MOOCs offered by your own organization? Here are some of the alternative credentials that have been or are being developed by various providers. Verified certificates. Anyone who enrolls in a course from one of the major MOOC providers can earn a certificate of completion, providing they meet the course requirements. Coursera and edX also offer verified certificates for certain courses. These certificates, which cost in the range of $40 to $100, verify the identity of the course taker. Through verified certificates, employers can be certain that it is actually their employees who are taking the courses. Course sequences. Recently, both Coursera and edX have introduced course sequences, which are pathways of three to nine courses on a specific topic, all with verified certificates. These are MOOC versions of professional certificates, and many require a capstone project to complete. Digital badges. Digital badges are becoming extremely popular in many types of alternative education, particularly those that incorporate gamification. Badges are a game element that have been introduced to education via the Mozilla Open Badges project. Digital badges have a couple of major advantages in the alternative credentials market. First, any organization can develop and issue them, and they are being used by companies, government organizations, and higher education institutions alike. Second, they are modular and information-rich, which means that each badge contains information about exactly what learners had to do to earn it. This provides a direct tie between the credential and the competency it represents. Badges can be used by companies in many different ways—to highlight learning, to reward collaboration, and for gamification. As learning becomes increasingly bite-sized and modular, digital badges will become even more widespread. Digital portfolios. Digital portfolios, or e-portfolios, provide flexible ways for learners to showcase their learning. Digital portfolios are powerful because they can combine credentials like degrees and badges with work samples, such as design work or marketing copy. In this way, they allow organizations to assess employees’ formal and informal credentials as well as their marketable skills. Digital portfolios have already become standard forms of enhanced resumes in fields like computer programming. 21st century transcripts. As the lifelong learning trend has developed, several education technology companies are exploring different ways to showcase a person’s entire life’s worth of education. For example, Degreed tracks both formal and informal education in a knowledge graph that can be used as part of a digital portfolio or resume. Accredible is another company that allows learners to create portfolios that represent all of their learning experiences. These are just a few of the initiatives toward creating a new transcript for the 21st century. Challenges to alternative credentials The main challenge to alternative credentials is that many organizations don’t know about them or know what to make of them. Traditional credentials, like degrees, may be too abstract to be as useful as companies would like them to be, but they are still familiar. In terms of usefulness for hiring, alternative credentials have yet to be proven in the marketplace, but that will just take time. As companies start to validate them, their popularity and their reliability will increase. In terms of using alternative credentials internally in a T&D program, the only real challenge is implementation, and it is a minor challenge at most. Mozilla Open Badges are free and easy to create, and most learning management systems support them, so all companies need to do is set up an account and start creating. New models of education like MOOCs aren’t changing just how education is delivered, but the way we think about credentialing as well. Alternative credentials will become much more prevalent in the near future as students, companies, and schools seek new ways to validate learning in these new digital environments. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Megatrends in MOOCs: #3 Updating the Competency-Based…13 Megatrends in MOOCsMOOCs and Unbundled Training2014: The Year of the Corporate MOOC?How MOOCs Are Improving Traditional ILT(Visited 92 times, 1 visits today)

The Millennial generation has posed one of the greatest challenges to the business world over the past few years. Millennials have different ideas from the generations that came before them about what jobs should be (i.e., places to learn and then move on), work-life balance (they believe balance is important), and the place of technology (they grew up with technology and much of their educational and social lives is already spent online). Millennials are changing how business is done, and in particular how workforce education is done. They are also the perfect audience for training MOOCs. What do Millennials want? What are Millennials? Digital natives who now make up more than one-third of the workforce. Tech-savvy self-directed learners. Young people who have spearheaded the rise of the share economy. Recent college grads who both expect and require extensive formal training to be successful in their jobs. Their attitudes toward work and training are fundamentally different from those who came before, and it is essential that organizations both recognize and embrace these differences. As the Allen Communications website puts it: "As learning professionals, we know we have to keep up with our audiences or be left behind. We also hear that Millennials bring an interactive learning style, fluency with new technology, and a sharing culture….Success starts with not viewing new technology in itself as the solution to winning over Millennials, but rather as a tool for creating layered approaches and improved engagement. In other words, with Millennials, you can’t simply rehash old content in a new format and expect improved results." According to Allen Communications, what Millennials want from a training program is "bite-sized learning, immediate feedback, and big-picture relevancy." The firm has identified video-based learning, gamification, and mobile support as the three best strategies for engaging Millennials. Notice that video-based learning is the primary method of content delivery used in many MOOCs and that gamification and mobile support are two major MOOC trends we’ve discussed previously in this series. Learning games company Sweetrush also offers tips for training Millennials. They suggest these four approaches for delivering training to this market: Tell them upfront what is expected and what they need to know. Keep it tech-savvy. Coach and praise along the way. Say it with visuals. Well-designed MOOCs are able to meet all four of these requirements in an engaging, effective learning environment. MOOCs and Millennials Of all of the uses for MOOCs in a corporate environment, training Millennials may be the one where the digital learning format can excel the most. Recent graduates know that they don’t have the specialized skills they will need on the job, and they expect their employers to provide formal training programs so they can acquire those skills. According to Sarah Doll, Accenture’s senior director of talent management, classroom instruction is not the best way to train this generation. These employees want meaningful projects, they want to "feel like they are adding value," and they "will learn faster and be more productive quicker if they do more on-the-job training." Not only are MOOCs an effective way to provide the type of training Millennials want and need, but a recent study by software consulting company Software Advice revealed that this generation may actually prefer this training format. The survey involved assessing the training preferences of 1,500 U.S. workers. Here is what they found: More than half of 18 to 24 year-olds, and nearly the same percentage of 25 to 34 year-olds, said that knowing a company used MOOCs for training "would positively affect their decision to submit an application." Nearly three-quarters of 18 to 24 year-olds, and more than half of 25 to 34 year-olds, said they would participate in a company-sponsored MOOC. Software Advice notes that this is particularly striking since the participation rate for mandatory e-learning is less than 70% and participation in voluntary training is barely over 30%. More than half of both 18 to 24 year-olds and 25 to 34 year-olds said they would be more likely to stay at a company that used MOOCs for initial training and as options for continuing professional development. Based on the survey results, it appears that MOOCs can be effective tools for attracting, training, and retaining Millennial generation workers. Challenges to training Millennials with MOOCs Using MOOCs in training programs actually addresses two of the major challenges many companies are facing today: The skills gap between what recent graduates know and what employers need them to know How to attract and retain fresh talent in an a competitive environment where young people no longer expect to stay at a job for longer than a couple of years The main challenges to actually implementing MOOCs in training programs for Millennials are the same as those to using MOOCs in general—many companies still don’t know what they are, what they can offer, and how to best use new digital learning environments to meet their training needs. But, as with most other aspects of today’s business landscape, this will change as technology continues to improve and more training departments become aware of the tools available. In addition, Millennials themselves will be drivers of this change as they demand more tech-savvy, meaningful, on-the-job training. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- offers 25+ years of training and talent management helping executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Training and Education for Millennials through Gamification13 Megatrends in MOOCsMegatrends in MOOCs: #8 Mobile LearningCorporate MOOCs: Getting Buy-In from Executives and ManagersWhy MOOCs? Why Now?(Visited 117 times, 2 visits today)

We have finally come to the end of a long road. We have looked at how MOOCs can foster learning organizations, encourage lifelong learning, and be used in competency-based training. We have explored how gamification, mobile learning, and microlearning are changing ideas and practices surrounding corporate training. And we have seen how MOOCs are changing the role of the instructor and causing us to rethink the credentialing system. Finally, in this last article in the "Megatrends in MOOCs" series, we’ll look at one of the most underestimated, but potentially most powerful, aspects of MOOCs—their role in building relationships: between companies and their current and prospective employees, companies and their customers, and even between business partners. It may see strange to say, but one of the largest impacts MOOCs have on training may not have anything to do with actual training at all. The importance of relationships Contrary to popular opinion, as we become more dependent on technology, our relationships are becoming more important. This is true in our personal dealings, but it is also an essential tenet of business in the current landscape. In an age when customers can sink a business by posting negative reviews, and employees can take to Facebook and Twitter to broadcast their frustrations, relationships are paramount to business success. Strong employer-employee relationships are associated with higher productivity and increased loyalty; positive customer relationships bring not only repeat customers, but also positive reviews on influential social media sites. No business that hopes to succeed today can ignore the importance of building relationships with these various audiences. MOOCs as relationships builders Currently, MOOCs are being used to facilitate relationship-building in organizations in a couple of main ways. First, they can help foster relationships within organizations. Higher education institutions have recently started experimenting with this idea. For example, Harvard now offers MOOCs specifically for its alumni, with the goal of strengthening the relationship between the school and its alumni (and hopefully collecting more alumni donations). As Ovum analyst Navneet Johal writes, "Institutions can use MOOCs to reframe and re-energize the mission of alumni in a way that makes graduates feel valuable as opposed to making them feel like money banks." MOOCs offered to alumni "can also contribute to graduates’ success by offering continued learning through their careers." The MOOCs serve as a way to keep everyone connected—professors, students, alumni. In organizations, MOOCs can play a similar role in fostering connections across teams and departments: they provide a way for employees to collaborate, discuss, and create the personal learning networks that drive learning and innovation. Second, MOOCs can help companies develop relationships with new and potential employees. This also mirrors a movement in higher education, in which MOOCs are being used to prepare students for college before they ever set foot on campus. Companies can offer pre-hiring or pre-start MOOCs so that when new employees arrive for their first day on the job, they are ready and able to dive right into meaningful work. Third, MOOCs are a new type of social media (a recent Ed Tech Magazine article called MOOCs "the next social networking platform") that can not only help companies realize the value of social learning, but also can foster relationships between employees, between companies and customers, and between others on both the public and the private stage. People interact within MOOCs on discussion forums, but also outside of MOOCs on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. Often, these social media feeds are incorporated directly into the course, but they can have a life long after the course itself has been completed. In this way, MOOCs help employees build and maintain social networks within and across organizations. They also allow companies to identify potential employees, as well as give businesses an outlet to engage with their customers on a personal level, including publicly responding to customer complaints and requests. Challenges to MOOCs as relationship builders The biggest challenge to using MOOCs effectively in a relationship-building role is that it requires companies and training departments to let go of a certain amount of control and allow training to transcend the classroom. Both traditional e-learning and instructor-led training are usually fairly well-controlled environments, but with MOOCs, you put the courses out there and they often take on a life of their own. Organizations that are willing to embrace a small amount of uncertainty have the potential to be amply rewarded—collaborations between employees can lead to new innovations and advancements that would not otherwise arise, allowing customers to engage with the company via MOOCs can lead to new insights about the target market, and companies willing to look past traditional credentials may find their next star employees in unexpected places. Organizations not willing to take this risk may find themselves out of touch with their customers and unable to attract and retain the next generation of talent. The major MOOC providers (Coursera, edX, and Udacity) have been around for about two years now, and their massive growth during that time has established their place as a force in 21st-century education, with incredible potential in workforce training. MOOCs are still very much in their infancy, but they are evolving quickly. The 13 trends we’ve highlighted in this series represent the major current experiments and future directions MOOCs are likely to take over the coming months and years. But that doesn’t mean you need to wait to implement MOOCs in your own organization. Smart companies are starting now to take advantage of the opportunities offered by this new and evolving digital learning environment. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:13 Megatrends in MOOCsUsing MOOCs: Partner and Customer RelationsMegatrends in MOOCs: #6 More Social, More CollaborativeUsing MOOCs: Self-Directed Development and Workforce…Megatrends in MOOCS: #5 Lifelong Learning(Visited 52 times, 1 visits today)

Over the course of the past year on this blog, I’ve described several ways MOOCs are already changing training and development. These digital learning environments and the technology-enabled learning tools that power them are making training more engaging, more relevant, and as a result, more effective. In particular, MOOCs have three main advantages over traditional instructor-led training: They allow training departments to easily unbundle content so that employees have access to the information they need when they need it.  They help foster peer learning and the development of personal learning networks within, and even between, organizations. They allow organizations to track and mine training data on a large scale to improve training results, discover relationships between variables, customize training programs, and predict training effectiveness. Looking into the (near future), there is a new technology that will help bring all three of these things together: Tin Can, aka the Experience API. Tin Can is just starting to make significant waves in e-learning and it is still on the horizon for MOOCs, but this technology has a huge potential to further transform corporate training. What is Tin Can? Tin Can is an application programming interface, or API, which is essentially a method that allows information to be shared across software programs. For example, an API makes it possible for you to share a YouTube video on Facebook or a photo on Twitter. Tin Can is an API specifically for learning activities. You are probably already familiar with the Sharable Content Object Reference Model, or SCORM, which is a specification that allows learning management systems (LMSs) to track e-learning user activities. The catch is that SCORM only works within the context of an LMS—it doesn’t interact with other programs. Using SCORM you can generate a large amount of data about how long learners spent on different e-learning activities, how many times they have to take an assessment to pass, and so on, but only as long as all of the learning activities are housed within the LMS. Here is where the problem becomes immediately evident: with cloud-based resources, Khan Academy videos, mobile learning applications, social media, and so on, most of our learning activities don’t actually take place inside an LMS. This is where Tin Can comes in: this API can track learning activities no matter where they take place. Tin Can collects learner data in what is called a learning record store (LRS). Very simply, an LRS comes in the form of a statement that a learner engaged in a certain activity. For example, "John watched Communication Video 1" or "Sharon attempted Question 3." Each statement has a description of the activity, a timestamp, and other information, and LRSs can stand alone or be sent to an LMS. (Read more about Tin Can statements). The point is that Tin Can is flexible enough to encompass many learning activities that SCORM can’t and, coincidentally, that training departments in general have been ignoring for a long time. So whether employees are learning online or off, from digital resources or even from one another, Tin Can is able to track the data. Why use Tin Can? What underlies Tin Can is the recognition that not all workplace learning happens within the boundaries of a SCORM-compliant LMS. Jon Aleckson, who writes the Managing eLearning blog, has identified five things Tin Can does better than SCORM: Better portability for content and data: Learning experiences no longer need to be housed within an LMS to be trackable. Better analytics of a user’s learning experience: Tin Can is highly flexible and thus can provide a wider variety of more precise analytics. More mobile and offline access for learning: Learners don’t need to be logged into a computer for their learning activities to count. More tracking of real-world activities: Meaningful learning doesn’t take place in a vacuum—it happens in the context of real-world activities. Recording formal learning activity and informal learning activity: Tin Can is able to track any learning activity that can be put into an appropriate statement. The Tin Can website describes how the API can be used to correlate training with job performance: "As we start to aggregate these [activity] streams across an enterprise, or even across an industry, we can start to identify the training paths that lead to the most successful outcomes. Or, conversely, we can identify the training paths that are leading to problematic outcomes. Now we can determine the effectiveness of our training programs and measure ROI." Now be honest: Can your current tracking system do that? What does this have to do with MOOCs? MOOCs are on the cutting edge of corporate training, and for all practical purposes Tin Can is on the cutting edge of MOOCs. But if you look at the goals of Tin Can above, I hope you’ll notice that they overlap quite well with many of the goals of MOOCs, including unbundled content, mobile learning, learning from real-world activities, and integration of formal and informal learning environments. Efforts to "Tin Cannify" popular learning resources, like YouTube videos, are ongoing, and the major MOOC providers have not integrated Tin Can into their courses. But there is some movement in that direction—Google Course Builder was starting to experiment with Tin Can before it integrated with Open edX, and some open-source e-learning platforms like Moodle also support Tin Can. Organizations are increasingly adopting MOOCs for everything from building talent pipelines to standard workforce training, to customer education. Integrating Tin Can into these digital learning environments will further enhance the effectiveness of training programs by providing more, and more relevant, data about all of an organization’s learning activities. Copyright 2014 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:Why Your Existing E-Learning is Failing, and How MOOCs Can…Megatrends in MOOCs: #4 Microlearning PathsMOOCs and MicrolearningMegatrends in MOOCs: #1 Adoption at Corporate UniversitiesMOOC Analytics: What Corporate Training Can Learn from Big…(Visited 324 times, 1 visits today)

Over the past few months, we have explored the social component of massive open online courses (MOOCs) from several angles. We have examined the role of peer learning in organizations and the importance of creating personal learning networks. We have also reviewed the major technology-enabled learning tools that MOOCs use to support social interaction. In this article and the next, we will put it all together by looking at why businesses should use social media in their training and development programs and various practical ways to implement peer learning through social media in corporate MOOCs. Many organizations are wary of social media, mainly because of a lack of control and the fear that social networking on the job will quickly devolve into "social notworking." This fear is probably largely unfounded—companies were also suspicious about email and the Internet, but there is little doubt (and a lot of empirical research) that these innovations have improved, not harmed, productivity. In today’s environment, businesses that do not adopt new technologies are setting themselves up for failure. According to a 2012 Capgemini report, digital leaders—defined as those companies that use new technologies such as social media, mobile technologies, and analytics—are 26 percent more profitable than their competitors and generate both more revenue and higher market valuation ratios. Some companies are even developing their own internal social media platforms. For example, last year GE launched its own Facebook-like social network, GE Colab. It is used by more than 100,000 GE employees to find information, share knowledge, and solve problems. The platform is used across functions, business units, and even continents. According to GE CIO Ron Utterbeck in an interview for MIT Sloan Management Review, the result is that the company is now solving problems faster, with people from different departments around the world working together. In general, the results of an Aberdeen Group study suggest that employees with extensive digital networks are 7 percent more productive than those without digital networks. So, how can social media enhance training and development? Here are just a few advantages of incorporating social media into training programs: Increasing engagement and interactions. I’ve mentioned before that Millennials spend nearly four hours every day on social networking sites. For this generation, connecting with others online is a natural human interaction and a regular part of the day. Many of them have probably already participated in courses with a social media component, so not to have instant access to their learner network would seem strange. Social media provides avenues for learners to interact not only with each other, but with instructors and subject matter experts as well. Extending the classroom. In traditional programs, when the seminar is finished or the workshop is done, the training is over. No wonder by some estimates people remember less than 20 percent of training content a month later. We just don’t learn that way—we need repetition, engagement, reflection, and most importantly application. Using social media extends the classroom so that students can interact before, during, and after training. They can take time to reflect and then ask questions or participate in discussions. Keeping the conversation going reinforces the content and helps keep the training both current and relevant, which translates into increased retention. Social media training. Many companies are now investing heavily in social media training to avoid online embarrassment and to teach employees how social media can be used productively in the workplace. Incorporating social media into other aspects of a program can both provide this essential training and give learners opportunities to practice their social media skills. This is especially important as more companies are following GE’s lead and developing their own internal social media platforms. This training can also help ensure that employees’ personal online activities don’t reflect negatively on the company or the brand. Developing and improving training content. Interactions on social media can serve as a window into what employees are learning and help instructors identify areas for improvement. Comments and questions from learners can inform future implementations of a course, and trainers can use MOOC analytics to evaluate the effectiveness of the training program. Recruiting top talent. Social media can be a powerful tool for recruiting new hires. In fact, in a recent survey by Spherion Staffing, 47 percent of workers said that when looking for a new job, a company’s online reputation was as important as the job offer. Businesses themselves are a bit slow to catch on to this trend—only 27 percent of companies felt that social media affected how prospective employees viewed their organization. Employees using social media as part of training can be part of the strategy for businesses to maintain their online presence. In addition to helping promote a positive reputation online, MOOCs make it possible for students to "try before they buy." Organizations can use this to their advantage by allowing prospective new hires to enroll, formally or informally, in training MOOCs. Hopefully by now you are convinced that social media integration is essential for your training programs to live up to their potential. In the next article, we will explore the different types of social media, the tools available, and how to use them in your training MOOCs. Copyright Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved. Bryant Nielson - Managing Director of CapitalWave Inc.- Being a big believer in Technology Enabled Learning, Bryant seeks to create awareness, motivate adoption and engage organizations and people in the changing business of education. Bryant is a entrepreneur, trainer, and strategic training adviser for many organizations. Bryant’s business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering the individual. Learn more about Bryant at LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/bryantnielson Related Posts:How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 1How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 1Megatrends in MOOCs: #6 More Social, More CollaborativeHow to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 2How to MOOC: Social Media in the Corporate Classroom, Part 2(Visited 43 times, 2 visits today)