1. 54 TD | June 2015
LEARNINGTECHNOLOGIES
R
eid 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

2. June 2015 | TD 55
podcast

3. 56 TD | June 2015
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 3.0
Far 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.

4. June 2015 | TD 57
Agile skill building
Individuals 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 best
One 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 creation
Many 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.

5. 58 TD | June 2015
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 is
The 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.
THE ABILITY FOR ORGANIZATIONS TO
DEVELOP AND DISTRIBUTE THEIR OWN
CONTENT IS INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT.

6. 071426.31610
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