Use of MOOCs ? A Boon for Corporate Training

Posted by 24x7learning on March 27th, 2015

A majority of online learners have been benefitted from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to hone their knowledge base and learn new skills. But in recent years a number of employers have turned to MOOCs to train their employees online and improve their staff base.

In corporate training some of the benefits of MOOCs are listed below:

• Employees can access training anytime and anywhere  

Employees need not wait for a scheduled training and can access their training anytime anywhere. MOOCs can be offered to unlimited number of employees without incurring any additional costs, be it material cost or instructor cost. MOOCs come with the flexibility of being accessed anytime by employees at the ease and convenience of their time without conflicting with their personal and work responsibilities. This ideally means that the employees are most likely to reap the maximum benefit from the online training material.

• Customization and Adaptive Learning

MOOCs have the advantage of being customized. Many such courses are created using open educational resources (OER) or a mix of OER and proprietary content. Training and learning is made more interesting and relevant and responsive to real-world problems as instructors can remix, reuse, and redistribute content based on the current and changing needs of the organization. Relevant research and information can be added into a training program and can reach all learners in real-time. As a corollary a major criticism of this form of training is that it is a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to a many-sized problem. However this idea is contested as new technologies are available to allow MOOCs to adapt to the needs of the user.

• Boosts employee productivity and profits

MOOCs are effective for employees to develop new skills and hone their existing skillsets, which acts as a boost to their on-the-job productivity. Reasonable in its approach, such courses are void of investing in onsite instructors or more complex eLearning course design and development as it widens the profit margin while giving the employees the requisite information for their professional development. MOOCs for corporate training give organizations the chance to streamline work processes and ensure that every employee is a valuable member of the team.

• Improves employee retention rates

Well trained and informed employees are content employees. When corporate employees are given the necessary information to effectively carry out their daily chores, they are more likely to remain longer with the organization. MOOCs for corporate training leads to increased employee confidence and self-esteem, which gives them the power to face on-the-job challenges and feel a sense of personal satisfaction with their performance.

• Learning Analytics

The advantage of MOOCs is that they can provide massive amount of data with which organizations can gage how many their employees can learn and grasp the content so that businesses can improve their training programs. With the help of learning analytics companies can predict employee performance and identify potential problems.