Lessons learnt: MOOCs in Business

ByGiuliano Alviani

Lessons learnt: Moocs for the world of business

Based on the implementation of 3 Pilot MOOCs, we present 9 (out 50) lessons learnt in the area of MOOCs for the World of Business in this section:

  1. In our experience MOOCs for companies are successful, especially when offered in a hybrid training model format, complementing the corporate training program or supplementing corporate offerings.

  2. MOOCs can compete with other proprietary business training, not only because they are for free, but also because they enable learners to potentially connect with many working professionals around the world and produced by quality providers like Higher Education Institutions.

  3. The majority of our learners came with career-related motives, especially to improve skills & to learn new things (more than 70% in all MOOCs).

  4. Some of the MOOC’s enrolment procedures elicited negative learner feedback regarding the number of steps and provision of personal data needed to enrol. This which might put off some registrations from business learners.

  5. We observed that MOOCs can be a great way to introduce a massive audience to a new topic/idea, and then follow up with a complementing, tailored offline or blended format.

  6. Many identified key barriers in our research at the beginning of the project (legal limitation, confidentiality issues, technical issues) were not observed during our facilitation of the Pilot MOOCs. This is perceived to be due to the fact our MOOC were not “official” company offerings.

  7. According to our research, still many companies don´t trust MOOCs yet.

  8. It is important for learners, to keep the possibility/option to stay anonymous when taking MOOCs.

  9. Finally, the real added value of a MOOC compared to other learning formats, could be the power of the cloud, the aggregation of knowledge around a topic by a massive amount of learners and experts with different cultural backgrounds. We aggregated many unbeatable knowledge hubs around specific topics, created by the learners in our MOOCs (see e.g. BiZMOOC result R4.2c Evaluation-Report-MOOC3-Intrapreneurship, Reflection on Reflection on and summaries of e-tivities, p. 25-26).