MOOCs in the corporate world ...

[Simon Rae]

Hi,

just to set the cat amongst the pigeons ... I have a slight problem with the concept of 'OPEN' courses ever taking off in the corporate world.

The corporate groups that I worked with tended to have a suspicion of courses ... although they recognised the benefits of training and development and encouraged staff to do it this attitude was undercut by a sense that people who were training weren't working. And on top of this they all tended toward a 'closed' mentality, i.e. if our people learn anything it must be relevant to the business and we don't want other businesses to know our business so keep it tight and in-house, the idea of sharing outside of the corporate business (i.e. in a open way) was not on.

I can see an open course maybe working within a company - open for all the staff in the organisation, but not open across the internet.

Are we talking MCOC (Massively Closed Online Courses)?

Simon

[Ignatia/Inge de Waard]

hi Simon,
good point, but ... I think that the closed option is for classic or old or dinosaur corporations.
When looking at the rising companies, many of them use an open culture ....mmm .... as I write this, I am beginning to doubt....

Let me start again. At first I thought that more recently and 21st century companies are having a transparent approach. They share via blogs, twitter... and their openness to what they do is in a way that fits social media rich internet

37signals.com
zappos.com

But than again ... rethinking it again... this could only be for marketing purposes, but maybe not for openness in allround management or HR.

Yet again, I feel this discussion can be mirrored in the academic world. There are those prefering to go for open science, with open data, open resources, open research... and than there are those who keep a more closed, or confined research going.

I feel there is a parallel across disciplines, and that it is not only confined to certain fields.

Simon

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[Nick Kearney]

I would suggest that openness, for the most part, does not go beyond the limits of the organisation, except in informal ways, under the radar. That is to say it may happen but very rarely is it a "strategy", and within the bounds of the company there or may not be more sharing, or more openness, or conversely more lip service to openness (it looks good) without real commitment. Twitter for example is not "open" for most uses, for the vast majority of corporates and others, it is simply one more marketing channel, one that has the added gloss of the "new", for the present. The use we and others in our field make of it for sharing knowledge openly may be increasingly idiosynratic.

But in the end if it is a public company, shareholder value is all, and the shareholders are likely to look askance at this kind of approach, as it places their investment at risk. They are not answerable, and their money and their attitude define the behaviour of the company as an organism. This is an observation. no more than that.

So I would agree with Simon, but rather than "cat among the pigeons",  I would suggest Simon is simply stating the cold reality. And I am not sure xMOOC are far from that corporate "control" vision - what price a MOOC for an international corporation with 30000 employees? This would be an MCCCC. Massively Closed Corporate Controlled Course. But it would be called a MOOC, as this year that is the acronym that spells words like "innovative" and "ground-breaking", whatever the reality.

Thinking about this suggest that the term MOOC has already been co-opted for other ends, and almost totally devalued. Perhaps not even the "c" prefix will save it. Maybe it is time to find a new way to talk about what we are doing.

[Amit Garg]

Simon, 

Great point....and it resonated perfectly as I sat thinking about the same topic last week. I blogged my thoughts here - http://www.upsidelearning.com/blog/index.php/2012/09/17/is-mooc-suitable-for-corporate-workplace-learning/ - questioning if MOOC will be suitable for corporate learning.

 

I agree with Inge that most 'open' stances by a corporate are mainly for marketing. And with Nick that shareholders will influence - most probably negatively - the growth of MOOCs in corporate. Still, I think the MOOC concept (the structure will evolve though I'm sure) will be important for corporate learning in times to come. In a 'few' years time when staff works mostly from home (or at least away from office) and manages his/her time to accomplish his tasks and is responsible for his/her learning, corporate will set up solutions like MOOC to allow their staff to get access to the right information, experts, and colleagues to learn and perform simultaneously. 

As I mentioned in my blog post - 

You know an idea’s time has come when ASTD and CLO Magazine start talking about it and when Google launches a product (free BTW) to support the movement. Perhaps the biggest validation of the concept comes from Bersin in this article analyzing the proposed acquisition of MindLeaders by SkillSoft. I think we should get ready to hear more of MOOC in corporate and workplace learning in near future.

I may be completely off the mark here, but that's what I'm thinking as of now.

Regards,

Amit