Hot or Not: How Do MOOCs Fit into Corporate eLearning?

MOOCs—massive open online courses—hit their stride in 2012:That was the year that Coursera wasestablished, partnered with more than 30 universities, and reached more than1.5 million students, according to the New York Times. The same year, edX, a joint venture of Harvard and MIT,launched—and registered 370,000 students in its first offerings.

MOOCs were, and still are, a way to offer access to highereducation to the masses. Many MOOCs are offered free of charge, andanyone—well, anyone with an Internet connection—can join. MOOCs have evolved duringtheir short existence: Some require tuition fees; some are part of nanodegreeor certificate programs; some are part of corporate eLearning or mass marketingprograms.

Learning Solutions Magazine asked five leaders in thearenas of eLearning, MOOCs, and academia for their thoughts on where MOOCs areheaded and whether—and how—they might be useful in corporate eLearning. We’vegathered (and edited) their responses.

Will MOOCs be incorporated into corporate eLearning to a greaterextent?

Bahaa Gameel, assistant professor of journalism and mediastudies at the University of South Florida–St. Petersburg, sees a role forMOOCs for connected individuals, inside or outside of corporations, who arelooking to improve their skills. “MOOCs provide them with unique opportunitiesto do so. They help individuals take online courses in different fields forfree or at low cost and offer courses from great programs and universities.”

George Siemens, executive director of LINK Research Lab at theUniversity of Texas–Austin, goes even further, envisioning MOOCs becoming partof training within corporate eLearning programs. It’s already happening, hesaid. Describing a partnership between Boeing and edX, Siemens said: “WhatBoeing is doing with their combination on edX with MIT is, they’re putting upto 1,500 engineers through some advanced design courses they wouldn’t haveaccess to previously.” If they’d sent those engineers to training with the MITinstructors in any other format, Siemens points out, it would be far more expensive.“When you have a large organization that has thousands of employees, being ableto instruct via a MOOC has significant benefits in terms of the quality ofinstruction that’s being delivered,” he said. “Rather than bringing someonefrom MIT to teach your engineers directly on your site, a MOOC allows a largenumber of them to interact with the faculty member remotely.”

In addition, Siemens sees a role for MOOCs in marketing andknowledge sharing, say, for an open-software company. There’s value in using MOOCsfor “teaching anyone how to use your platform, tools, or products.”

Finally, Siemens sees opportunities for small companies toinexpensively provide advanced skills training to employees via MOOCs.

Not all embrace MOOCs so enthusiastically. Ellen Wagner, vicepresident of research for Hobsons, an educational software company, and AllisonRossett, professor emerita of educational technology at San Diego StateUniversity, point to the broad openness of MOOCs as a reason that theirusefulness in corporate eLearning might be limited.

Noting the availability of structured, free content, Wagnersaid, “Why wouldn’t companies want to use MOOCS? Well, one really good reasonis that, if the content isn’t the right content for what you want yourcorporate learning to do or drive, then why would you bother using a MOOC? Whywould you bother managing someone else’s MOOC for your learners—unless therewere a specific value-add coming back to your organization?”

Rossett sees a lack of intersection between the strengthsand goals of MOOCs and the objectives of much corporate eLearning. “MOOCstranscend boundaries; they allow wisdom, smarts, with messages to go beyondconventional boundaries. You can deliver to people of different ages, people indifferent locations, and people with different economic needs—but that’s notwhat corporate learning is about. … I think more important to corporatelearning right now is accountability and personalization, and MOOCs are notgood at those things.”

She emphasized the lack of accountability that oftenaccompanies openness: “A MOOC is very broad-brushed and not particularly goodat checking whether Mary or Jorge has done it. You’re better off with the KhanAcademy approach, which is very much about personal and individual and metricsand a set curriculum. They set out objectives; they match content andpresentation; they match assessment to the content, the flow of expected objectives,and they can measure people on that. That’s much better for learning softwareor even basic skills than a MOOC.”

Gameel raises the question of digital readiness. “There is an assumption that anyone with Internet access canlearn from MOOCs. However, individuals’ level of engagement with informationand communication technologies (ICT) is one of the factors that determine theirreadiness for online learning. Therefore, corporations should exert enougheffort to make sure that their employees are trained to use ICT efficientlybefore expecting them to learn and benefit from MOOCs.”

Do MOOCs offer anything of value to corporate learners?

Wagner and Gameel emphasized the openness, flexibility, andfree or low-cost content as benefits to corporate learners. “[The] MOOC formatmakes it easier for individuals to benefit from them and explore differentfields that learners might have little knowledge about,” Gameel said.

Wagner hedges a bit, stating that “MOOCS are a greatlow-risk way of exposing people to new content,” but adding, “It really dependson the learning goal to be met by the resource at hand,” and mentioning the lowcompletion rates of many MOOCs.

Stephen Downes, senior research officer for learning andperformance support systems at the National Research Council, Canada, points tothe flexible format as a way to provide performance support or personalizedlearning: “When we think of a MOOC, we typically think of a course that youstart at the beginning and take step-by-step until you get to the end. This isindeed a way to use MOOCs to support learning. But because the course is open,it is useful for much more than formal training. Any point of the MOOC may beaccessed at any time, allowing staff to return to any point in the course. Thisprovides excellent point-of-need performance support, especially if the courseis well indexed or comes with a strong search function.”

Downes suggests that corporations can use MOOCs to educatebeyond the walls of the company: “A MOOC helps staff extend [educational]capacity beyond the corporation—to current and potential clients—reinforcingpromotional material, proposals, or analyses with material drawn directly fromthe MOOC. A well-designed MOOC will be developed with this sort of function inmind, offering not only content and information, but also direct access tobusiness process functions.”

Siemens, too, offers a broad perspective that looks tofuture applications of MOOCs that are only beginning to be imagined orrealized: “Companies can use them for a range of benefits to develop their staffskills, to market and promote their products, services, and so on. Theconception we have of MOOCs right now is quite narrow, compared to the way I’mstarting to see some corporations use them.”

A strength of MOOCs that Siemens cites is access to areas ofstudy that are not commonly available. “One of the opportunities here is thatmany of these topic areas [covered by MOOCS] are not well reflected intraditional university curriculum. So, if you’re somebody who’s working at JohnDeere or working at Boeing or Microsoft or wherever else, and you want to getup to speed on how neural networks work, chances are you probably won’t see acourse in your local university continuing education program on neuralnetworks—which means that, in order to get that kind of instruction, you haveto have access to MOOCs.”

They also offer access to experts and expertly vetted andcurated content. Siemens describes a key function of MOOCs akin to the role ofa printed textbook—but more dynamic and easily updated. “How is it anydifferent from a textbook or from a regular book? I can learn everything aboutmath anywhere; the fact that someone has pulled these things together, who wetrust, in an integrated structured way makes all the difference in terms ofquality,” he said. “Learning is primarily a coherence-forming process. When welearn something, what we essentially go through is this period of understandinghow one topic relates to another topic we understand, which things are false,and so on. Now, if we learn on our own, we can still get there, but the realityfor many of us is that we don’t learn well on our own in that format becausethere’s so much room for error and inaccuracies to creep in. As a result, weturn to experts or we turn to coherent knowledge units so that we know thatwhat we’re learning is vetted; we trust the source and the person who isteaching it.”

Certificates and “nanodegrees” via MOOCs

Several large MOOC providers, including Udacity, edX, and Coursera, offer digitalcredentials—certificates, nanodegrees, or badges—that learners can earn bytaking a MOOC or a series of MOOCs and completing assessments.

For Rossett, this moves the format away from “MOOCiness” andmore toward a Khan Academy model ofmore tailored instruction. “The essence of MOOCs is that there is one or a fewexperts who produce a broad offering, usually experienced over the course. … It’susually not a big commitment, it doesn’t demand a ton of you, it’s in thecontrol of the learner more than it’s in the control of the instructor orprofessor. If you start moving toward credentials, you’ve got to haveassessments, you’ve got to have people touching you, supervising, managing thepeople or the system—it becomes a very different type of story. … But it’slosing its MOOCiness. It’s becoming more personalized and Salman Khan-ish, moreeLearning-ish, and less MOOC-ey. It depends: How MOOC do you want to be?”

Focusing in on potential for personal and professionaldevelopment, Wagner hails the advent of credentialing. “If people can achievethe goals of the credentialed learning through a MOOC, good for them. The wholepoint is to find a pathway that works for each individual learner, right?”

Yet she—along with all the other respondents—raisedquestions about how valuable these credentials are right now. “Respectfully, atleast for a while, while the outcome measures are determined, being able todemonstrate the skills learned in the MOOCs is probably more important thanbeing able to show the certification that a MOOC has been completed.”

Siemens echoes that worry: “The value or certificate isreally only useful if you trust the source that’s giving it, and I don’t thinkwe’re quite at a point yet where Coursera or EdX or Udacity have the marketingor the reputational power of a traditional university—in fact, I know we arenot there yet.” But he also believes there might be a solution, where learningoccurs in a MOOC but assessment is done internally: “It’s something I’ve lookedat before, the idea that we can teach globally but assess locally, meaninganyone can take the course, our focus then is on the assessments at a morelocal level.”

How might MOOCs evolve in 2017 and beyond?

Downes sees a bright future for MOOCs as a sort of learninginfrastructure: “We think of MOOCs (and of online learning generally) in termsof web-based platforms like Udacity or Coursera. These platforms, however, aregradually being transformed into data services. What this means is that theycan be defined as cloud technologies and integrated with other types ofservices. A MOOC or an online course would therefore function as a mechanismfor scaffolding or facilitation around a set of content resources, includingcontent created in workplace environments or training departments, or by courseparticipants.”

Siemens also envisions MOOCs moving into new areas: “Now we see MOOCsbeing used for everything from a certificate that someone can get that willladder into a master’s program; we’re seeing them being used for marketing andPR purposes; we’re seeing them used as customer support tools; we’re seeingthem used as professional development resources for individuals within acompany. I think it’s not entirely unrealistic to expect, over time, we’regoing to see them being used for a range of other things. … I think any mediumthat has a significant audience at its disposal eventually becomes normalizedas a teaching and a learning tool, and that’s what we’re going to see happenwith MOOCs.”