The technology around us is changing rapidly and even the L&D teams are challenged to keep up the pace with the latest trends in the market. They need to train their employees on the best practices, new skill sets but due to lack of resources they are unable to implement e-learning or just in time learning within the organization. MOOC, comes as a big saviour for all the organizations who want to quickly train their employees on some specific skills.
MOOC is aimed at unlimited participation and open access via web. Apart from providing traditional course materials like lectures, readings, and problem sets it will also provide interactive user forums to support community interactions among learners.
Now let’s evaluate if MOOC is suitable for corporate & workplace learning by looking at some statistics :
1) 8% of the companies are using MOOC and in the future, it is expected to grow up to 28 %
2) Uptake is highest in the public sector with 42 % learners using MOOC
These numbers show the growing acceptance of MOOC in corporates and public sector organizations. So here are some enables MOOC for workplace learning:
1) Flexibility
MOOC is loved by most of the learners as they will be having the freedom to learn at their own pace. The same assignments will be given to all the courses at the same time.
2) Social Learning
Employees are using social platforms so MOOCs encourage that trend as they are open online courses with massive social participation by the learners.
3) Up to date content
As new courses are built on MOOCs on a regular basis they help the learners to absorb the knowledge and be updated with the current skills sets which are required for them to perform well at the workplace.
4) Helps to optimize the cost
Modern day organizations have a geographically spread employee base making it difficult for them to train all the employees at once. Thus with the help of MOOCs, they can train a large number of employees at once and it even reduces the costs of training of the company when compared with traditional classroom training.
5) Learning Analytics
MOOCs also provide real-time analytics that captures the entire learner’s journey and they will also suggest which course and formats work best for the learners.
6) Certificate
Many MOOCs offer college certificates which formalize the learning. Even in the workplace, these certificates are considered valid both for promotions and overall employee growth.
7) Flip the Classroom
In e-learning, if the learners had a doubt, there was no tool to interact with the course developers or SMEs and learners faced difficulties posting their queries. Now with the help of discussions and case analysis, the users can create their own group in MOOC and help others to solve their queries and to get proper solution for their questions.
8) Strong Brand Presence
Although corporate MOOCs are created from open source content curated from the web, they can be customized in a way that they represent an organization’s unique vision and values when the knowledge is being shared. Therefore, MOOCs help to create a strong brand presence in the minds of employees.
9) Helps to identify talent pipelines
As MOOCs tracks the entire progress of each and every learner it helps the organization to know who has completed the course, how long they took to complete it, and how they performed. This helps the organization to know who are the potential employees whose learning curves are sharp and are working on improving their professional skill sets. This helps the organizations to build their talent pool for future organizational leaders.
Top tech giants like At&T, Google, McAfee etc are using MOOC to train their employees. So MOOC, if chosen and implemented well, has a huge potential to take the organizational learning curve forward.
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