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LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, once said, “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

This might describe how the brilliant minds behind the first MOOCs—massive open online courses—are now feeling. The technology has come a long way since 2012, when professors at the world’s most prestigious uni-versities started putting their lectures online for anyone to access for free.

For learners, those early MOOCs involved watching videos of the professors delivering their lectures and, if they were so inclined, partici-pating in an unproctored discussion with other students in the course. At some point, there might be a multiple-choice test.

don’t call it a

BY STEPHANIE CASTELLANO

The next generation of online learning is so much more.

MOOC

PHOTO: THINKSTOCK

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podcast

PHOTO: THINKSTOCK

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The ability to host these courses in the cloud and share them with thousands of peo-ple around the world led to great excitement and grand predictions that higher education would never be the same. But the disappoint-ing reality was that the early MOOCs simply bled students. It was common to see retention rates around 5 percent, with more than half of registered students never even viewing the first lecture. The whole experiment seemed like a flop.

Since then, entrepreneurs have jumped in to help academics save the MOOCs. But the results don’t resemble those early courses at all, and the players in this new market are hesitant even to apply the term MOOC to the services they offer.

“It’s not that we have anything against the term, it’s just that I think it’s misleading,” says Paul Sebastien, vice president and general manager at Udemy for Business, a platform for creating and hosting online courses. “It conjures images of solutions that existed a couple years ago that just don’t have the kind of usability, quality, and pragmatic, skills-based focus that Udemy’s courses have.”

As more companies such as Udemy for Business emerge, the term MOOC has been receding. It now seems to refer less to a method of instruction, and more to a point in time when it became possible, through web-based video, to distribute education on a massive scale.

“That concept became codified as a MOOC,” says Sebastien. “Now we’re taking the promise of this concept and turning it into something that solves real-world problems and needs. That’s where we and other players in this space are focused.”

Online learning 3.0Far from being just another way to broad-cast content, this new wave of online learning builds bridges between three stakeholders: individuals and organizations who need to acquire skills; subject matter experts who teach them; and companies that provide the tools and the platform for the learning to take place. With one bound, many “MOOC-style” course providers have left higher education and landed in the corporate training market.

The focus here is on teaching tangible skills that are in high demand by employers. Not just videos of talking heads, these online courses are interactive, engaging, and designed for mobile delivery, with games, quizzes, and learner analytics built in.

They encourage social learning and knowl-edge sharing. They’re taught by industry professionals. Many of them are bite-sized. One course provider, Grovo, offers more than 4,500 videos on various topics, most of them technology-related, and all of them no longer than 90 seconds.

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Agile skill buildingIndividuals or companies searching for online course providers will find that many of them are set up like marketplaces. They offer sev-eral courses, covering a vast array of skills. Individuals and companies can browse their selections, choosing the learning opportunities that meet their needs. Some course providers also work directly with companies to develop more tailored courses.

These approaches allow learners to “mix and match” skills, says Sam Herring, CEO and founder of Intrepid Learning, a cloud-based learning solutions company. “I think there’s a huge future in nondegree credentials that im-part practical job skills for the independent, self-directed learner. Credentials can be either ‘unbundled’ from traditional degrees to meet a particular market or company need, or created anew to meet demands for emerging skills.”

Udacity, one of the first MOOC providers, now offers what it calls “nanodegrees”—a type of credentialing process designed to prepare students and employees for today’s technology jobs (and at a drastically lower cost than a tra-ditional degree). The credentials are designed and recognized by industry professionals, and students learn by working on projects that are meaningful to employers.

This agile approach to education also has online course providers racing to be the first to market with the latest, most cutting-edge skills and topics. “For example, Apple’s Swift programming language came out of the blue, and Udemy was the only platform that had a Swift course online within three or four days after Apple announced it,” says Sebastien.

Learning from the bestOne aspect of early MOOCs that remains a selling point for online course providers are the instructors teaching the courses. They tend to be the best in the field; individuals with rare expertise in their subject matter, or companies that are providing training on their own products or services. A student might be taking a course on social media analytics from a data scientist at Facebook, learning search engine optimization hacks from a marketer at

Google, or learning Photoshop from a trainer at Adobe.

Professors at the world’s best universities often are tapped for their expertise, joining with online course providers to teach employ-ees at organizations around the world. In 2014, Microsoft worked with Intrepid Learning to design a cloud-based course on business acu-men and financial strategy that was tailored to the learning needs of Microsoft’s global sales force.

Professors from INSEAD, a leading gradu-ate business school, were brought in to teach. The course had an 85 percent completion rate, and 95 percent of learners said that the course would improve their performance on the job. Those who successfully complete the course earn an Executive Education certifi-cate from INSEAD.

Easy course creationMany online course providers also allow companies to create their own courses—no instructional design skills required. “When companies come to us, we show them how to create their own online courses in Curatr,” ex-plains François Walgering, co-founder of the MOOC Factory, a Netherlands-based com-pany. Curatr is an innovative social learning platform that allows users to build courses from any digital content. “The platform is very user-friendly. You don’t need a background in instructional design.”

With more organizations spread across the globe, the ability to develop and distribute their own content is increasingly important. Sebastien estimates that half of his Udemy for Business customers are using the platform to create their own courses. “I’d say in the last several months this has really exploded; this need for companies to create their own very

MANY “MOOC-STYLE” COURSE PROVIDERS HAVE LEFT HIGHER EDUCATION AND LANDED IN THE CORPORATE TRAINING MARKET.

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proprietary, very ‘secret sauce’ training for their employees, and then be able to distribute that content globally.”

The MOOC Factory works with several companies to design private courses that allow employees to share internal knowl-edge and best practices. Walgering says that companies come to them with the same questions: “How do we train the next gen-eration and keep the knowledge of senior employees? How do we identify experts in our organization? How can we share com-pany knowledge with new employees in their first two years?”

Partnering with academia“Most of the time we are serving as the con-nection between universities, government, and companies, trying to build something that fills that gap between universities and organiza-tions,” says Joss Maassen, co-founder of the MOOC Factory. The company often designs courses for universities, tailoring the curricula to fit industry needs.

Many of the original MOOC providers have gone this route, offering themselves as part-ners in instructional design to education institutions as well as companies. In an arti-cle for Slate magazine titled “Forget MOOCs,” technology writer Will Oremus discusses the evolution of SPOCs—small private online courses—in higher education.

These courses involve MOOC-style video lectures that are delivered to traditional college classes as part of a blended learning approach. So far, they’ve been proving more effective than MOOCs. Organizations such as EdX, Coursera, and NovoEd are now focusing their energy on SPOCs, working with universities to design hy-brid courses that include social, experiential online learning components.

Call it what it isThe term SPOC has caught on in the corpo-rate training market as well. Walgering and Maassen say they typically design MOOCs for organizations that want to provide customer education on their products or services, and SPOCs for organizations that want to train their employees internally.

Another term floating around the online learning sphere is (feel free to groan) COOCs, or corporate open online courses. They tend to be cMOOCs—connectivist MOOCs—which involve learner collaboration and assessment (as opposed to xMOOCs, or extended MOOCs, which are broadcast to an unlimited audience).

All these acronyms are causing some con-sternation among learning professionals who are trying to stay on top of the ever-shift-ing trends. “We get asked every day, ‘Is it a MOOC?’ ‘Are you really a MOOC?’ and ‘Should we be using that term?’” says Herring.

“Isn’t it all just online learning?” asks Se-bastien. “Or learning, period? Everything’s online, everything’s connected, everything’s in the cloud.”

“We could sit down and figure out what the best acronym is, but we don’t really care,” adds Herring. “What we’re really talking about, and what inspires us, is to create the next genera-tion of blended learning experiences that can scale massively, that are collaborative, that are mobile first, that really take the reality of the modern learner to heart. They’re about understanding that people want short form, they want on the go, but they want all things to snap together into something that’s mean-ingful, immersive, and practical for their work environment.”

Stephanie Castellano is a writer/editor for the Association for Talent Development (ATD); scastellano@td.org.

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