Seven “C”s Ensure Learner Engagement in Corporate MOOCs

Microsoft,working with Intrepid Learning and INSEAD School of Business, recently delivered the company’s first corporateMOOC, Business Strategy and FinancialAcumen, to over 1,000 savvy and notoriously difficult-to-delight MicrosoftSellers. Over 85 percent of the sellers completed the rigorous training (thisis 17-times higher than the completion rate for the average academic MOOC) witha 95 percent satisfaction rate. What drove these results? Here are the factorsthat we, the director of design at Intrepid Learning and the project managerfrom Microsoft, see as making the difference.

An importantfactor was that the MOOC was offered to only a select group of sellers, solearners felt a certain honor in being selected to participate.  The concept of exclusivity at scale was avital “hook” to engagement, but ultimately success of the program would comefrom respect for the learner embedded in the course design.

Respect for the learner + best practices for engagement =success

One-way, inflexible,broadcast-style training fails to work, to the extent that it doesn’t respectthe modern learner’s time, intelligence, workload, and competing life and workdemands. So how do you make completing the training worth a busy learner’swhile? We believe the answer is by using these seven basic best practices forlearner engagement: content, context, curation, communication, collaboration,competition, and certification.

1. Content: The content has to really add value tothe audience (especially if it’s an audience such as sales people) over and abovewhat they can learn on the job themselves. The content needs to come from asource that is trustworthy, and it needs to be presented by someone who hascredibility with this audience. For this course, it was vital for thepartnership to include global business school INSEAD, whose professors not onlyunderstood global business strategy on the theoretical level, but who tailoredthose theories to Microsoft Sellers in their everyday work.

2. Context: There are a million books, articles,listicles, and top-ten tips learners could read if all they want is conceptualknowledge. What learners need to know is how new concepts apply to their particularjob (each specific learner’s context) and more importantly, to their customer’sproblems (their specific customer’s context). A good rule of thumb: for everyconcept presented in the course, also present two examples of how that conceptapplies to a hypothetical or real customer situation (give an example and a non-example),specifically a situation that relates to the market the learners are navigatingright now. In this course for Microsoft, we created context by following upconcepts with examples and discussions around how these applied to the seller’scurrent customers.

3. Curationand co-creation: Apart fromcurating content to present to the learners, you should curate learner inputfrom the course in real time and present it back to the audience. This achievesmultiple objectives—acknowledgement and reward for those who contribute, andbringing together individual insights into a shared understanding of the topic.Two good methods, both of which we used in this course:

   • Scanthe discussion forums for the most incisive individual responses or interestingdiscussion threads on a topical issue, and highlight them for the cohort atlarge.

   • Identifycommon topics and questions from the forums, and have the professor or instructorpost a short video responding to those topics or questions. Word clouds areanother easy, visual way to concisely summarize what your learners are talkingabout.

4. Communication: Everyone is busy! Your learners are noexception. They need to know exactly what is expected of them and when. Hittingthe right balance of communication from the course to the learners, in platformand offline, is critical. Not so much communication that they start to ignoreit, but not so little that you let them miss important deadlines and due dates.Two more “C”s to keep in mind here: consistency and conciseness. In theMicrosoft sales course, we sent a reminder email every week three days beforeassignment deadlines, and kept bulletins about new content short, to the point,and relevant.

5. Collaboration: The way people on the job usually applytheir skills is in a team context, so your course should mirror that, usinggroup learning activities. This kind of practice also lowers the barrier for carryinglearning over to the job after the course is over, by helping to build themuscles that learners will need to exercise later. Examples:

   • Discussionforums that get groups to focus on solving a problem together

   • Exercisesdesigned to leverage missions (real-world assignments) with follow up requeststo review and vote for the best (using the “like” button).

   • Createopportunities to apply a concept offline with a coworker (or a team) and bringit back to the platform through a shared, peer-reviewed report, so everyone canlearn from each other.

6. Competition: Collaboration is good, and necessary, butdon’t ignore the driving motivation for any group of motivated professionals—theneed to compete. As we saw clearly in the Microsoft sales course, if youleverage points and badges in such a way that learners can see progress towardstheir own goal and be able to seewhat others are doing, it can be a tremendous driver for completion. Ourplatform’s Leaderboard showed individuals their score and progress, as well ashow each one was stacking up against cohort averages.

7. Certification: Credibility, and the ability to show itoff later, can be a big boost to a learner’s motivation. For our course, thecertification was an executive education certificate from INSEAD, which carrieda lot of cachet among sales professionals. But you can build other “certifications”and give your learners a way to show professional credibility within yourorganization even without an outside partner using badging or internal certifications.

The MOOC designteam at Intrepid Learning showed that “respect the learner” is one of theircore values, and these seven “C”s (content and context, curation andcommunication, collaboration and competition, and certification) make goodsense for many learning situations. In the case of Microsoft’s sales trainingit all came together to phenomenal success!

But don’t fret ifyour organization’s reality might require modifications to this mix. There arealways ways to mix and match the tenets of learner engagement according to yourparticular needs and requirements. Experiment and modify—just be sure to keepyour learner firmly in mind, and be aware of how your seven Cs relate to oneanother. Great content, for instance, must be placed into a specific context. AMOOC must create opportunities for collaboration without ignoring the drivingmotivator of competition. And so on. The bottom line is, if your learners are engagedwith the course and excited about their learning journey, they’ll really learn.