The promise of MOOCs is appealing … massive to scale an organization’s limited resources, online on any device, open to people who wouldn’t otherwise have access, but that course part? It gets boring fast. Courses can be too linear, too logical, and too long for digital learners. It’s time to face up to the fact that courses are an artificial way to learn, invented 150 years ago to make farmers into obedient assembly line workers.

Preconceptions of eLearning, lack of instructional design insight within organizations, disjointed learning ecosystems, and the perceived size of the task in front of them mean organizations have lacked the confidence to take their more complex programs into the online domain. However, online learning is opening the doors to more flexible, sustained, and comprehensive support for learners than ever before.

Learning professionals have a number of difficult goals to achieve relative to the creation and management of online learning. We need to ensure consistent quality, visual identity, and education outcomes of effective learning objects that are reusable between programs and delivery methods. As many challenges as we face, sometimes the solution itself presents its own new set of issues. In the case of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, massive open online courses (MOOCs) were both a challenge and a solution.

There was a time, not that long ago, where the lowly training team, in tough times, was the first to go. Training was the expendable critter scurrying through the business wilderness picking up resource scraps and being kicked around by larger apex predators. Over time we evolved into learning and development moving up the corporate food chain. Have we now reached an evolutionary dead end? Do we need to become a different species to move up any further?

MOOCs have become a popular buzz word in the industry over the past couple of years. While interest in MOOCs continues to increase, our understanding of what MOOCs are and where they can best be applied to help organizations and individuals learn has not kept pace.