MOOCs: from Academia to Corporate

MOOCs,
fromAcademia
to Corporate
A DOCEBO WHITEPAPER
Copyright © 2015 Docebo - All rights reserved.
Docebo is either a registered trademark or trademark of Docebo S.p.A. Other marks are the
property of their respective owners. To contact Docebo, please visit: www.docebo.com

MOOCs, From Academia to Corporate
A panel discussion with industry experts Aaron Silvers, Mike Orey, John Leh and Erica LeBlanc, aided by Docebo’s
Josh Squires and Roberta Gogos.
JOHN LEH
—
CEO and Lead Analyst at Talented
Learning. He’s an LMS selection
consultant who helps organizations
plan and implement technology
strategies that support extended
enterprise learning. Over the last 18
years he’s advised over 100 learning
organizations with a total technology
spend of $50m.
AARON SILVERS
—
A designer, technologist and
strategist responsible for helping to
bring massively adopted learning
technologies into organizations
around the world, notably SCORM
and xAPI (otherwise known as Tin
Can). He leads the IEEE Learning
Technology Standards Committee
charged with the international
industry standardization of the xAPI.
DR MIKE OREY
—
An Associate Professor at the
University of Georgia, who’s a teacher,
researcher, designer, developer and
visionary.
ERICA LEBLANC
—
The Operations Development
Manager for the IP and science
business at Thomson Reuters, where
she manages a team of instructional
designers focusing on the creation
and delivery of customized sales
training courses.
—
These were some of the issues that were addressed in a webinar organized by Docebo, the disruptive Cloud e-learning
solutions provider. Docebo had assembled a team of four online learning gurus to discuss the topic. In addition to Roberta
Gogos, Marketing Director of Docebo and Josh Squires, Docebo’s Chief Operating Officer of EMEA, the
webinar featured:
Panel Discussion
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have their
detractors and their skeptics; while those offering MOOCs
are wondering how to make money from the intellectual
property that comprises these courses. Nonetheless,
despite being relative newcomers to the online learning
scene, MOOCs have already shown their potential to
disrupt the academic and corporate learning worlds - in
terms of price, technology and even pedagogy.
There’s a great deal to be said in favor of MOOCs – not least
that they provide greater access to learning and a wider
range of knowledge from different cultures and countries –
but technology isn’t beneficial merely because it’s there.
Digital-based learning activities can be inauthentic and
not relate well to everyday uses. Moreover, you can now
get lots of digital learning materials for free – and not
exclusively from MOOCs.
Furthermore, research from the MOOC provider, Coursera,
has revealed that some 85% of their MOOC users have
degrees. This suggests that MOOC students tend to be
drawn from the already privileged in society.
Those signing up for MOOCs tend to be confident, top
achievers - not the poor, and certainly not those who’re
unable, for whatever reason, to access the internet.
They considered ten key questions about MOOCs.

2MOOCS, FROM ACADEMIA TO CORPORATE - A DOCEBO WHITEPAPER

Q1
—
What’s a MOOC?
Mike Orey explained that MOOCs stands for massively open online courses.
Focusing on the first two of these words, he said that ‘open’ means that they’re
free to learners – and asked, “So what does that mean for companies that want
to make a profit?”
He said that most MOOCs involve watching some sort of a video - sometimes
a long video. Students take a multiple choice test and discuss things with other
students in a largely unproctored discussion forum. In his view, it’s not really a
conversation and it’s really not relationship building.
He pointed out that the first MOOC attracted some 100,000 students but only
1000 or so completed the course. Today, you see people calling things MOOCs
that have between 100 and 300 students.
As the ‘M’ becomes smaller, you’re left with the ‘O’ (online) and the ‘C’ (courses),
he said. ‘Online courses’ means e-learning – and when it comes to creating highly
interactive e-learning experiences on a smaller scale, the key to effectiveness
is less about technology and more about how you form relationships between
teachers and students - and among students.
John Leh said that the original idea of MOOCs was that university professors
would capture their live course content over a semester and then put it online
for free – allowing anybody in the world with access to the internet to consume
this content.
 Today, MOOCs tend to refer to a collection of individual courses from
one source, such as a university. MOOCs can also be defined as the
learning management system (LMS) platform that allows people or
organizations to create, host and deploy content. 
He stated that there are now for-profit and non-profit MOOCs. Examples include
Udacity or Coursera (for-profits) and university MOOCs such as edX (non-profits).
Furthermore, since MOOCs come from academia, they’re often categorized
by their instructional approach. A video-based MOOC with online grading is
known as a broadcast MOOC. A MOOC with group grading and which focuses
on a collaborative experience where learners share with each other – via social
learning for example - is referred to as a connectivist MOOC.

 The ‘open’ in the word MOOCs means
that they’re free to learners, so what does
that mean for companies that want to
make a profit? 
Mike Orey

Q2
—
What’s the future for MOOCs?
Erica LeBlanc believes that a sustainable business model for MOOCS involves
them partnering with businesses to offer their platform either as an internal
service for employee development or as a customized MOOC that has material
related to the product or service of the businesses.
In Aaron Silvers’ view, MOOCs provide a way to sell academic text and reference
materials to ‘non-traditional students’. They also provide an ancillary market
for the kinds of materials that universities need to sell in order to provide
the student experience. However, the term MOOC may be misapplied in the
corporate world – since, there, it’s neither ‘massive’ nor ‘open’.
John commented:
 Free is tough to sustain - and something has to give in the process.
That could be the quality of the individual courses. 
From a corporate, academic and an e-learning standpoint, just watching a video
for an hour of somebody speaking in front of a classroom is extremely dull.
Yet, to do it better requires time, money and effort – and, to get it up to the
standards that we’re used to, costs money to buy the software to create and
then host it.
“If, potentially, you have hundreds of thousands of learners, you’ve got to have
an environment that can support that type of traffic. That costs money. So,
whether they’re for profit or not-for-profit, MOOCs aren’t driven to generate
revenue because, otherwise, they’re a complete cost center - and that’s
unsustainable in the long-term. The easiest way is this freemium approach.
“Currently, you don’t get college credit for attending a MOOC class,” John added.
“You get to attend it. You get to learn the knowledge, and you can take an
assessment - which can get you a certificate once you’ve completed it. However,
the value of this certificate is debatable - and you don’t get the college credits.
It’s not the same as actually going to Harvard. So MOOCs are offering this
freemium approach where the content is free but, then, something is paid for.
Currently that’s mainly at the certificate level but I predict that, one day, you’ll be
able to take a MOOC online and obtain college credit. That will be when MOOCs
go more mainstream.”
Mike pointed out that a university is a business in the sense that it’s selling its
product. He continued: “MOOCs are giving people a free trial of the experience
of taking a university class and, at the end, you can get the continuing education
credits for a small fee. Some smaller universities are now offering MOOC
students the opportunity to get college credits but, mostly, they’re using these
MOOCs to attract students to come to the university full-time and pay full tuition
fees.”
 MOOCs are giving people a free trial of
the experience of taking a university class
and, at the end, you can get the continuing
education credits for a small fee 
Mike Orey

Q3
—
From a corporate perspective, what types
of MOOCs are there, how are they being
implemented and why would a corporation
want a MOOC?
Having spent 20 years in the corporate sector, John doesn’t think MOOCs are,
or will be, disruptive. He said that, from a ‘massive’ standpoint, there are LMS
deployments in the US Department of Defense (DoD), in associations and some
non-governmental agencies that are massive by MOOCs’ massive standards. He
added that, in technical terms, existing LMSs can do everything that a MOOC
does. They can be used to assemble course content and blended learning paths
for any length of learning program – and can cope with social learning and
mobile delivery.
“We already have the ability to show any type of content, so the only thing that
MOOCs really provide is the ability to have free content that you can then deploy
to your internal employees or your extended enterprise,” he said. “And, while
that has value, free content isn’t necessarily engaging content. So MOOCs aren’t
taking off from a corporate perspective.” Aaron agreed. He commented:
MOOCs are a good vehicle for brand evangelism and community development
that can potentially lead to sales enablement. There are markets that benefit
from that approach – such as healthcare, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare
products in technology organizations that produce such technologies and
products, manufacturing equipment and hardware where you’re dealing with
safety issues and things like that. It can also help where you want to provide a
value add to your customer base or your partners, in terms of showing them
how to use your product, or raising public awareness about what you’re doing.
“Computer and mobile technology could also benefit from the MOOC approach,
along with makers, vendors and software developers because, when you’re
facing a customer audience, you’re talking about being ‘open’, potentially
‘massive’ and you’re not so much concerned about how many people complete
the learning. You’re there to inform and serve the community - so it’s a form a
community development. There are collaborative community approaches to be
had inside an organization but I wouldn’t call them MOOCs. They’re a form of
blended learning.”
Erica’s view differed from John’s. She said: “Corporate partnering with MOOCs is
something that’ll be evolving in the next few years. A reputable MOOC, coming
from the universities, or platforms like edX, could be integrated with corporate
development plans. So an LMS wouldn’t necessarily render MOOCs irrelevant.
There’s a lot of information that needs to be transferred to employees. If the
information already exists and comes from a reputable university, I’d take
advantage of that.”

 We already have the ability to show
any type of content, so the only thing that
MOOCs really provide is the ability to have
free content that you can then deploy to
your internal employees or your extended
enterprise 
John Leh

Q4
—
Are MOOCs really a disruptive force in learning?
MOOCs aren’t going to be a disruptive force in learning, principally because of
the overall poor quality of the learning experience they provide, according to
Mike. Instead, he believes that e-learning has already become that disruptive
force. He explained: “When I started at the University of Georgia in 1989, we
never advertised for students to enroll in the university. They just came.
But, now, they have so many other options - including university courses offered
online from the convenience of their homes. That’s transformed learning. All of
our master’s programs, which used to be held face-to-face at Athens, Georgia,
are now all online.
“Georgia Tech is now offering a collection of MOOCs that lead to an
undergraduate degree in computer science but I don’t think that that’s going to
be the overarching model,” he added. “I think e-learning is certainly a disruptive
force but I don’t think MOOCs are.”
“It’s all about money,” suggested John.
 The difference between e-learning and MOOCs is the investment and the
quality of the content, as well as a different business model on how to market
and sell that contents. 
As Dr Orey describes, you can pay for online college education. An alternative
business model is to provide that training for free and charge for the actual
course credits upon successfully passing the assessments.
“I think both business models are sustainable and both business models will
drive revenue - one more so than the other. Moreover, there are always market
disruptors in every industry that come up with a new way of charging for the
same thing. While some universities will take this up, others - probably the most
prestigious ones - will resist it.”
Aaron’s view is that it’s not MOOCs but the prevailing economic forces that are
promoting MOOCs as vehicles to provide academia with an economic benefit.
He said that the disrupters might be the delivery mechanism, the experience
of it and/or the collective approach towards experience. He stated: “I think it’s
going to come down to the quality of the content and then the experience of it
that’s going to truly disrupt within that space but, again, I don’t think that MOOCs
are disrupting academia so much as the economy around it.”

 MOOCs aren’t going to be a disruptive
force in learning because of the overall
poor quality of the learning experience
they provide. Instead, e-learning has
already become that disruptive Force. 
Mike Orey

Q5
—
What’s the primary benefit to businesses
offering MOOCs?
“Universities are using MOOCs to get customers,” said Mike. “The same thing
can happen with companies that are in business-to-consumer (B2C) markets.
The financial advising sector offer free courses at hotels in a bid to get more
customers. I think that they could do the same thing with a MOOC and they could
reach more people that way.”
Erica, Aaron and John agreed. John added that the principal benefits of MOOCs
to businesses can be seen in terms of career development, sales enablement
and customer education. He said: “But, again, I look at it from the LMS lens and
I can’t stop thinking that we’ve already been doing this for ten years. We provide
customer learning and customer education of the highest e-learning quality to
customers globally. We’re already doing this on a massive scale – and many times
it’s open.”
Q6
—
Will MOOCs up-end the fundamental structure
of teaching - especially in a corporate setting?
John believes it’s possible for MOOCs to reshape teaching or the economic
structure of teaching if MOOC content can achieve consistent high quality and
give people a viable alternate business model. Conversely, because there’s
still a demand from individuals to have an accredited academic degree, Erica
doesn’t see MOOCs disrupting the fundamental economic structure of teaching
which universities can supply. She commented: “With teaching there’s a
classroom experience, a network experience, a personalization and the practical
application. You’re also together with like-minded peers. All those are things
which MOOCs don’t provide.
“When you’re part of a MOOC, anyone can join,” she said, adding that, therefore,
there’s no guarantee - in terms of the social learning interaction that’s a major
part of a MOOC - that all the participants have shared intellectual backgrounds
or goals.

 Universities are using MOOCs to get
customers – the same thing can happen
with companies that are in business-to-
consumer (B2C) markets. 
Mike Orey

Q7
—
What will be the effect of MOOCs in developing
countries and immature learning markets?
Erica explained that MOOCs are offering people in developing countries access
to previously almost inaccessible knowledge. She said: “A key word here is
outsourcing. These people are getting knowledge from accredited universities to
help them develop reputable businesses.”
Aaron took up this theme – the hope that MOOCs will democratize the education
of the underrepresented and the disenfranchised, making knowledge accessible
to all. He said that there are signs of this happening, via non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), to the underrepresented and disenfranchised sections
of society in the USA. He added: “The practices we see working in developing
countries are taking hold, even in developing countries. There’s evidence that
the people who really like using MOOCs are the people who already have all
the advantages of education. There’s nothing wrong with that – but we need
to recognize that there are different needs and different expectations of what
success will look like when we’re talking about immature markets.”
Q8
—
How do you see corporate acceptance of MOOC-
based education?
Josh Squires asked: “Does a person having 60 MOOC certificates provide the
same value to an employer as one with an MS or BA?”
Mike’s view is that it depends on the reputation of the organization that
produced the MOOC(s). He added that supply and demand will drive this
acceptance and, once MOOC certificates are generally accepted, they’ll become
commonplace. He said: “Employers are now hiring people with an e-learning-
based degree just as often as they hire someone with a face-to-face residential
degree.”
According to Aaron, the development of open badges is providing a credentialing
system that’s open and accredited, where it’s traceable. The validity of the
accreditation is attributed to the validity of the badge issuer. He said: “Over time,
if you’re looking to hire a project manager and you find someone who’s gone
through a MOOC experience to earn their project management professional
certification, you’ll look at that person seriously. What matters is the relevance
of the competencies that are represented by whatever certificates people are
getting from a MOOC - and what level of rigor is applied to qualifying those
certificates and the people issuing them. Moreover, employers have to know
what level of capability has been demonstrated and evaluated for the job
applicant to obtain those certificates.”

 Over time, if you’re looking to hire a
project manager and you find someone
who’s gone through a MOOC experience
to earn their project management
professional certification, you’ll look at
that person seriously” 
Aaron Silvers

Q9
—
How can you close the gap between MOOCs’
high enrolment and low completion rates?
Mike revealed that he’s been teaching online since 1998 and, over that time,
the drop-out rate from his online classes is the same as the drop-out rate from
the classes he teaches face-to-face. Generally, he said, everyone who starts the
course, finishes the course. He asked: “Can you reduce MOOCs’ drop-out rate by
getting people to pay for the course? If you do, the learners have an investment
in the course but, then, the MOOC isn’t ‘open’.”
Arguing that watching videos, taking multiple-choice tests and having online
conversations with fellow-learners is not ‘great teaching and learning’, so it’s no
wonder that the drop-out rates are high, he said: “To establish teacher-presence
you need to form relationships with the students. That means you have to have
conversations with them. How can you implement a Socratic method if you’re
not engaged in a conversation with students? Yet that’s impossible to do with a
massive number of students. The problem with MOOCs is that they’re what they
are. You can’t fix the high drop-out rate because there’s bad instruction.”
“Maybe paying a fee in that freemium approach of paying for the credentialing or
the certificate is still a way that the education is open but something tangible is
not,” John responded. “Nonetheless, studies have shown that, when students pay
a fee, they’ll persevere through boring content because they saw enough value
in it to buy it in the first place. So charging is automatically going to increase
completion rates. Because a MOOC is free and there’s no commitment on the
student, it’s easy to register yet never attend. A lot of people aren’t going to do
that if they’ve got to swipe their credit card to get on the course.”
“Coming with MOOC certificates or MOOC credentialing in the future will be the
same as coming with any other type of higher education degree,” agreed John,
but he added that, at present, MOOC-related qualifications aren’t held in this
high regard.
“Even today, though, if somebody shows up for a new job and has the relevant
credentialing and someone else doesn’t, the credentialing from a MOOC is going
to be accepted. The self-starters who’re taking these courses and documenting
them on their user profiles or their performance appraisals are going to have
more advantages than those who don’t.”

 Nonetheless, studies have shown that,
when students pay a fee, they’ll persevere
through boring content because they saw
enough value in it to buy it in the first
place. 
John Leh

Ignoring the economics of MOOCs, Aaron focused on their design, saying:
“The reason MOOCs tend to have high enrollment and poor completion rates is
because there’s low engagement. The only reason any MOOC student sticks with
it is because s/he has the will to do it.
“One of the challenges of going with a platform approach is that you’re
subscribing to a lot of the baked-in design decisions about what the experience
should be,” he continued. “So a MOOC that’s primarily video-based with some
discussion forums only addresses a handful of user cases about how people
want to learn - particularly when we move away from the academic world and
look at learning in any professional setting.
 Many of those learners will want to dig into content later. They’re going to
want to annotate it, recall it and bookmark it. They’re going to want – or need - to
participate in discussion forums. 
“So there are issues of being deliberate in the design assumptions. You buy into
a platform and do what it pre-programs you to do - but you’re buying all the
assumptions that go with it. You need to recognize that they’re not necessarily
what you or your organization needs.”
Aaron’s recipe for reducing drop-out rates is to introduce elements of blended
learning, where the tutor engages with the learners to create an experience
that’s big enough to include everybody who’s signing up.
Q10
—
Are MOOCs actually disrupting anything?
“Academia, yes; corporate America, no,” said John, laconically.
Aaron added: “MOOCs aren’t disrupting academia so much as are other things
- and I don’t know that MOOCs are really disrupting much of anything else.
There’s no data around MOOC analytics. There’s no evidence of what they’re
disrupting. While I think there are people who’re self-motivated and who’re using
MOOCs to learn, I think those people would be self-motivated to learn via any
other means, given its availability.”

 MOOCs aren’t disrupting academia
so much as are other things - and I don’t
know that MOOCs are really disrupting
much of anything else. 
John Leh

Afterword
by Josh Squires COO of Docebo EMEA
While the potential of millions of people all collaborating on
a single topic or subject in a shared learning environment is
extremely exciting and revolutionary to say the least, the
reality (at least for today) is far less likely to spark that
collaborative brilliance that the origination of the MOOC
platform initially promised.
MOOCs are a concept that is still struggling to find a
market niche within the corporate world. In the traditional
education space MOOCs have a massive following with
students and degreed individuals participating in classes
with tens of thousands of participants, all of which
are working via discussion boards, video lectures, and
assessments or assignments to further their understanding
of the topics being addressed. In the corporate world
MOOCs are not getting the traction that we are seeing in
Academia. The main reason for this is that a MOOC stands
for ‘Massively’ – a lot of people, ‘Open’ - free, ‘Online’ - web
based, ‘Course’ - learning content organized according to
instructional design principles.
It is very difficult for any but the largest of corporations to
have a following around a subject that they are willing to
give away to the masses for free. Often, organizations get
a small following of interested participants who quickly
lose interest as the collaboration and engagement aspects
within the environment being to lose their initial luster.
Unanticipated costs to the corporation start to rise as
the benefit of giving free training to users becomes
difficult to justify. It is very difficult to fulfill or even justify
the requirements of being a MOOC from a corporate
perspective in the current market.
All is not lost however and there are models that have
proven successful within some organizations so if your
heart is set on a MOOC there is still a case to be made to
launch one. I would however take a deep long look at your
business requirements beforehand and evaluate whether
a MOOC is a requirement needed to solve your issue, or
whether some very good, targeted learning can accomplish
the same (refer to this article entitled: Is it a MOOC or just
eLearning).
MOOCs are going to be around for a while and their
evolution and adoption levels will fluctuate while the market
determines the most effective models. There are a large
number of learning and engagement models within the
Learning and Development field and MOOCs are just one of
many that are being implemented and with limited success.
As of today MOOCs have yet to prove their effectiveness in
relation to some of the more established models of online
engagement and retention, or in Market Disruption. In my
opinion MOOCs are riding the wave of public awareness
however they have yet (at least in the corporate world) to
make their case for a rush to adopt.
Josh Squires is currently serving as the Chief Operating Officer of Docebo EMEA. Josh has spent the past 15 years
researching and implementing creative learning solutions within corporate and higher education environments.
With clients ranging from Motorola to Disney, he has been on the designing and implementing stage of a wide
range of learning scenarios with customers spanning the globe. Josh has also taught Instructional Technology
theory and tools, as a consultant and faculty member, for over eight years in both Corporate and Higher Education
environments.

For more information, visit www.docebo.com
www.facebook.com/Docebo
twitter.com/docebo
www.linkedin.com/company/docebo-srl
Try a 14-day free trial at www.docebo.com

MOOCs: from Academia to Corporate

Recomendados

Recomendados

Mais conteúdo relacionado

Mais de DoceboElearning

Mais de DoceboElearning (20)

Último

Último (20)

MOOCs: from Academia to Corporate