MOOCs in Workplace Learning - Part 4: Their Role in Corporate Universities

The world has gotten complicated. Organizations are struggling to keep up with the shifts:

• in technology that are vastly impacting how people work, 
• in the demography of their workforce which has become culturally diverse, multi-generational, and globally dispersed, 
• in the nature of work that has moved from complicated to complex and emergent, 
• and with the general fragmentation and breakdown of all aspects of the known ways of doing things. 

We live in an age of dramatic oxymoron - unemployment is high yet there is a talent shortage. It is no surprise that skills required to meet this changing trends are in woefully short supply. The formal education system still functions as it always did churning out graduates ill-equipped to meet the demands of the current day organizations. The skills shortage looming ahead is alarming to say the least. It's roughly estimated that only "20% of the workers will have the skills needed for 60% of the jobs (mostly because the job haven’t been invented yet) by the end of the decade". http://hrtimesblog.com/2013/04/24/today-at-impact-finding-your-way-in-the-shifting-ethos/ 

This infographic of a Deloitte Survey spanning 90 countries look at the talent issues that can threaten organizational effectiveness. "Critical new skills are scarce - and their uneven distribution around the world is forcing companies to develop innovative new ways to find people, develop capabilities, and share expertise" (Ref: http://dupress.com/articles/hc-trends-2014-introduction/). And this interactive dashboard lets you explore the trends using different filters and parameters. Leadership, retention, HR skills, and talent acquisition occupy the #1 slot as per the Top Ten Findings of the Global Human Capital Trends 2014 Survey. In the same survey, HR and talent executives graded themselves a C-minus for overall performance, citing a large capability shortfall, with 77% of respondents ranking the need to re-skill HR function among the top quartile of their priorities (Ref: https://hbr.org/2014/07/what-it-will-take-to-fix-hr/). Today, we live in an era where 85% of the value creation stems from brand, intellectual property, and people - all intangible assets. 

To add to this, we will have a workforce largely made up of millennials (those born after 1980) by 2020. Millennials will  soon rule the world: But how will they lead is an incisive article by @Josh_Bersin on the way Gen Y views the world of work, leadership, career progression and learning. They are going to change the nature of organizations and the way work is perceived. And it is time to start equipping them to fulfil their potential. They will expect and demand to learn differently -- social, mobile and cloud will play a big role. Forward looking and thinking organizations will need to / have already stepped in much ahead in the process - way before sourcing and recruitment can happen - to build the requisite skills in the emerging workforce and to keep the existing workforce employable and their skills current. 

While we recognize that the onus has gradually shifted to the employees to keep themselves marketable / employable with updated skills and deep specializations (free agent nation), we also have to be sensitive to the fact that not everyone will know how to go about it. Organizations, in their own interest, will have to step in and create an ecosystem (often perhaps in partnership with academia) to build the workforce for the future. There are many organizations like Infosys which is stepping in at the K-12 and pre K-12 levels to enable youngsters to prepare for the new age skills. 

None of this information is new. This was just to set the context, a prelude to what this post discusses. This post, as the title says, is about Corporate Universities (CU) and the role of MOOCs therein. My intention was to set the context for why I feel CUs are set to make a comeback. CUs are not new and the most famous is perhaps GE's Crotonville established in 1956. A well-designed Corporate University (I will discuss the design aspect in a sequel to this post) is aptly positioned to tackle both business issues and talent issues. It is time to accept that talent management is a critical business need and a business process; it is not an HR/L&D process. The latter are enablers and ensure the implementation of the process. A CU is in a unique position to understand the immediate as well as the strategic, long-term requirements of an organization. It can help an organization with its capability building at an individual level and provide opportunities for shared vision, systems thinking and team building at a strategic level thus providing the entire gamut from tactical learning to integrated and strategic learning. 

Josh Bersin in the presentation 21st Century Talent Management points out some of the following as imperatives for a holistic talent system (slide #9): 

• Creating Magnetic Employment Brand 
• Changing Corporate Culture
• Rebuilding Management Skills and PM
• Improving Time to Competency
• Creating Talent Mobility

Take a look at the presentation for a deeper insight. 

It doesn't take too much of reflection or analysis to see that these were precisely the goals and vision that CUs were set up to meet. CUs were created to meet the unique needs of each organization including their culture, strategy and vision. I am not saying that all orgs need a CU but then maybe some do... A CU will ideally target all aspects of an organization's business development needs including talent acquisition, succession planning, career development, and team building. I will not go into the details of how a CU needs to be formed. There is enough material out there on this. 

I will highlight a few shifts and trends that will likely have an impact on the role of a CU in today's world: 

1. Capability development and continuous learning will be critical to business success 
2. Gen Y's will expect to grow rapidly in their career and lead at an early age 
3. Employer brand and employee engagement have become interchangeable 
4. HR will have to adopt Analytics in a big way  
5. Social, mobile, and collaboration will be everything (almost)

As Josh Bersin has said, "Our candidates today are not looking for a career; they are looking for an experience." 

In the past, CUs were seen as an overhead and an administrative burden. However, in today's uber connected, mobile, cloud-based and networked world, a CU can very well reside - at least partially - in the cloud. The physical overheads will still exist, but to a lesser degree and for more focused reasons. In an age of all-time low employee engagement, CUs help organizations to not only create a strong brand presence but also to communicate the org's inherent and deep interest in facilitating continuous learning and growth for the workforce -- strong "pull" factors for today's generation. CUs also help to build strong customer relationships by bringing customer feedback into the programs, and enabling critical skill building like leadership, which is #1 priority for all orgs across all sectors as mentioned above. 

One of the methodologies that IMHO CUs can adopt is MOOCs. I have written about MOOCs in workplace learning here (launching a MOOC), here (designing a MOOC), and here (some points to consider). It is perfectly possible and feasible to tie up with established MOOC providers to design courses specific to the needs of the organization as Tenaris did when it partnered with edX to provide training to its 27,000 employees. "Bank of America partnered with Khan Academy to create BetterMoneyHabits.com, a cobranded MOOC to educate consumers on personal finance. SAP developed the openSAP MOOC platform to educate its ecosystem of developers and partners on SAP technologies" (Ref: http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2013/11/30/the-mooc-marketplace-takes-off/). 

Not all MOOCs need to be custom-built either. Training and programs related to strategic and operational competencies unique to the organization can be designed in-house while more generic industry and academic specific competencies can be acquired via open MOOCs. Employees can be directed to "open" MOOCs to acquire the relevant certifications. MOOC-providers like Coursera have also started Specialization tracks where a targeted sequence of courses lead to certifications. LinkedIn has tied up with Coursera to facilitate direct publication of these certificates to one's profile. Thus, CUs can benefit by integrating MOOCs into their larger organizational learning strategy. By taking a blended approach with MOOCs as one of the methods, CUs can become more effective in disseminating the necessary programs. Here's an article on the 12 success factors of a CU published in the CLO magazine 10 years back but still relevant. 

MOOCs have the advantage of scalability and the ability to target a large and distributed audience base. The design of MOOCs also foster the building of communities and cohorts. MOOCs can have the following advantages for CUs: 

• Provide opportunities for subject matter experts to become learning facilitators
• Reinforce learning through critical social learning conversations and collaboration
• Expose the entire workforce to a variety of courses thus bridging silos and enabling people to find their interests
• Enable peer-to-peer collaboration and learning 
• Personalize learning by connecting it to people’s daily work 
• Grow a more skilled workforce

Sites like http://mooc.org/ facilitate the creation of MOOCs by various target groups from educational institutions to businesses and non-profits. 

Reference links: 

1. Spending on Corporate Training Soars: Employee Capabilities Now A Priority
2. http://www.slideshare.net/jbersin/talent-management-revisited?ref=https://www.linkedin.com/in/bersin slide #5

MOOCs in Workplace Learning - Part 3: Launching a MOOC

This is a continuation of my MOOC series and also a post that draws a lot from the #MSLOC430 community and MOOC ("C" type) that I am participating in -- the open section of the graduate course in the Master's Program in Learning and Organizational Change at Northwestern University. 

Before I plunge into the heart of my analysis and discussion, I want to share a couple of snippets on Networked Learning from Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Networked_learning)

Networked learning is a process of developing and maintaining connections with people and information, and communicating in such a way so as to support one another's learning. The central term in this definition is connections. It takes a relational stance in which learning takes place both in relation to others and in relation to learning resources.  

Network learners of the future will have access to formal and informal education of their choice, wherever they are located, whenever they are able to participate … The network learner will be an active participant … learning with and from experts and peers wherever they are located.

In this post, I am going to focus on what IMHO are requirements and demands from MOOC participants and organizations looking to go the MOOC way. I have written about what constitutes a corporate MOOC and some of the design principles of a MOOC in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, respectively. With organizations thinking of MOOCs as a scalable and cheaper way of providing training and professional development opportunities to the workers, it is important to keep in mind a few considerations before launching a MOOC. 

One of the shortcomings of being human is that we tend to measure & judge the future through the lenses of the past. As Marshall McLuhan so memorably put it: "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." We run the risk of evaluating MOOCs using traditional learning principles. Worse still, we will end up trying to design MOOCs to reflect traditional, linear learning models. In both cases, we will fall short and will not be able to perceive the benefits of a MOOC ecosystem. Here are a couple of things that MOOCs are NOT. 

1. A MOOC is NOT an on-line course with a discussion forum and a couple of other "social features" tagged on to it. 
2. A MOOC is NOT a linear program (though xMOOCs do give that feeling) with a neat start and en end. 

IMHO, a MOOC is an evolving and dynamic learning and collaboration ecosystem that may encompass more than one technical platform and various modes of learning from short, byte-sized videos and e-learning capsules to user-generated content in the form of reference links, blog posts, discussion threads, and much more. MOOCs are well-suited for open-ended topics that generate discussions and debates, have new knowledge and research growing around it, and are of interest to a wide audience. 

I came across a telling sentence in the article, MOOCagogy: Assessment, Networked Learning, and Meta-MOOC that completely resonated with my belief of what a MOOC can be, and hence my focus on what it takes to design an ecosystem for a MOOC. 

"MOOCs are anthropological opportunities, not instructional ones."

Having said this, I also understand that MOOC as a design methodology is flexible and can be crafted to suit an organization's needs, culture and context. I am calling out a few things to distinguish traditional learning design approaches from a MOOC. Moreover, for organizations looking to adopt MOOCs as one of the methodologies, there are a few considerations to keep in mind. To make MOOCs successful, it is important for orgs to have:

• Community managers and facilitators -- I have written about this later in the post. 

The rest of the points below are more to do with the culture within an organization. 

• Executives who participate and "walk the talk" 
• A culture of sharing and participation 
• A willingness to make mistakes, ask questions 
• A spirit of collaboration over competitiveness
• A level of comfort with social tools and norms (discussion forums, blogging, micro-bloggging) 

Characteristics of MOOCs

A MOOCs core aspects are participation and emergence. The characteristics and context of a MOOC (when effectively facilitated and thoughtfully designed) evolve as it progresses. The initial topic becomes the trigger around which communities and cohorts form, discussions take place, resources get created and shared. MOOC platforms like Coursera and Udemy have mobile apps that make accessing these MOOCs at any point of time a seamless experience. It also means that participants engage more actively and can share content in various forms -- videos, pictures, podcasts, micro-blogs, and forum posts. The other social aspects of liking and rating add to the engagement level. Enter wearables into the scene. And user engagement might see another dramatic shift. MOOCs and wearable tech together can create a world of working and learning as yet unexplored and unimagined. 

As mentioned by @LnDDave in his presentation on Wearable Tech, it has enough disruptive power to forever change how we work and live. Learning will simply become integrated into our life-stream. A MOOC, even within the context of an organization, has the capacity to bring together an incredibly varied group of people with wide cognitive diversity -- different world views, perceptions, frameworks and heuristics. Thus, a Community of Interest can form around the original topic of the MOOC, which serves as a catalyst to bring people together. 

Future of MOOCs - an Example

Imagine a student conducting a lab experiment somewhere in one corner of the world. She works out loud and records it on her wearable camera (part of any one of the devices she's wearing), and uploads it to a forum which happens to be part of the MOOC she is attending. Others in the forum get to see the recording, share their opinions, discuss it further, conduct their own experiments and upload videos. All of this happens within the span of a day. The participants are an eclectic bunch ranging from students doing part-time MOOCs and full time regular classes to folks working in different sectors. 

Let's take this imaginary example a bit further. One of the MOOC participants (let's call her Amy) happens to be scouting for likely candidates to assist in a research project. The work will happen on-line. The selected candidate needs to have a flair for research, an innate curiosity and an exploratory mindset. As she participates in the forum, she reads responses from one participant that piques her curiosity. Amy gets in touch with the participant, and finds her research assistant. 

Facilitating a MOOC 

Coming back to some practical suggestions for facilitating MOOCs: A YouTube video on Community of Inquiry shared by +Helen Blunden in her post, cMOOC, Social Learning Guided Design or Community of Inquiry – All The Same? refers to three kinds of presence within a Community of Inquiry: teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence. This is a different lens and framework through which to view facilitation of an online community. While CoI's exist within an academic setting, I think the framework can be applied in a corporate setting. Can we take this framework -- the three roles of facilitators -- and extrapolate into a MOOC environment? 

Within an organization, the three aspects of the role may not / need not be played by the same individual. 

1. Teaching Presence: This role can be played by the SMEs (subject-matter experts) for that particular topic who pose queries, respond to questions of a technical nature, and share their expertise.
2. Social Presence: This can be taken up "community managers" / individuals who are comfortable with social tools, have an understanding of online participation and can facilitate the participation of others. Maybe, someone from the L&D team can take up this role within the context of an org. I have written about the importance of acquiring new skills for L&D. It is also very likely that the participants will step into this role, enabling and encouraging each other. 
3. Cognitive Presence: This aspect of the role is going to shift among everyone. I have to still build this out and am mulling over the topic... 

I am looking for inputs from my network. This blog is still work in progress and and mostly a summary of half-baked thoughts. A shout out to the #MSLOC430 community for triggering various ideas and sharing so generously...

MOOCs in Workplace Learning – Part 1: Some Points to Consider

MOOCs – you can love them or hate them but you can definitely not ignore them. Despite countless stats on MOOC dropout rates, MOOCs are appearing everywhere. And IMHO, we will continue to see this phenomenon rise. 

Having taken the world of higher education by storm (though not everyone will agree), MOOCs are all set to disrupt/re-invent workplace learning. Just as the advent of e-learning created a shift in training paradigms a couple of decades back, MOOCs are set to create another shift today. With the rise of MOOCs, we are also likely to see social, collaborative learning take root in organizations. And learning design will move from fixed course formats to a blended modality of curated content, custom-built content and user-generated content including ongoing conversations. Needless to say, none of this will be easily achieved. Workplace learning designers, consultants, organizational leaders and change agents, and employees will have to work in collaboration to bring about this shift. I have been writing about MOOCs in the space of corporate learning for some time now. Here are the links to some of the older posts:

1. From Micro-Learning to Corporate MOOCs
2. MOOCs in Performance Support
3. 11 Difference between a MOOC and an Online Course

In this post, I want to focus on the questions that the corporate world is likely to ask when thinking of going the MOOC way. 

Q: How do we define a corporate MOOC? How is it different from the xMOOCs we are familiar with?

While definitions of MOOCs abound, none of them are fixed and final given that the form itself is still evolving, I have highlighted a few characteristics of a corporate MOOC rather than pin it down with a definition:

They will be “open” to everyone inside the organization: 

So far, corporate courses have been designed with a fixed set of target audience in mind and with the intent of imparting new knowledge and skills or bridging existing skill gaps. Course design have been based on an analysis of past performance data or a prediction of skills the organization might need in the future. MOOCs, on the other hand, although designed with a primary target audience in mind will be open to anyone and everyone in the organization. This will provide the employees with an opportunity to acquire skills and knowledge in their areas of interest beyond the purview of their current roles thus equipping them with new skills, a critical aspect of professional development. Moreover, by opening up cross-functional knowledge to the organization, corporate MOOCs can be very effective in bridging silos, if effectively launched and facilitated.

They can be “semi-synchronous”: 

MOOCs can have a blend of modalities from videos and podcasts to reference links to blogs and articles, excerpts from books, whitepapers and so on. Apart from the content, MOOCs are characterized by the discussions that take place around the content – in the forums, on Google hangout, over twitter... Some of these discussions are asynchronous as in the case of forums giving workers the opportunity to respond at their own pace, and some may be synchronous giving distributed employees an opportunity to interact with their peers and colleagues around a topic over a google hangout session. This semi-synchronous aspect make MOOCs appealing and effective for a wide range of topics and audience base. 

They can serve different purposes: 

Some of the uses of MOOCs are listed here:

• Build talent pipelines -  
• Onboard new employees – McAfee and Intel 
• Provide self-directed development – Pitney Bowes 
• Workplace training – Yahoo! 
• Brand Marketing – Bank of America 
• Collaboration and Innovation – Google’s g2g 
• Train channel partners and customers – 1-800-Flowers.com 

(Ref: ASTD_TechKnowledge Presentation)

They will reflect the organizational values thus strengthening the brand: 

Corporate MOOCs—even when created from open source content curated from the web—will be put together and customized in ways that represent an organization’s unique vision and values even though the knowledge being shared is generic. Thus, MOOCs provide a good platform for organizations to create a strong brand presence in the minds of employees – both existing and prospective. MOOCs also provide organizations with opportunities to introduce their experts to the larger community thus motivating the individuals concerned while strengthening organizational value and brand. 

They can become platforms for capturing tacit knowledge: 

By virtue of having discussion forums and user-generated content capability built into MOOCs, they help organizations to capture the much needed context and tacit knowledge. In this age of complexity and rapid change, MOOCs can – if well facilitated – become triggers for innovation and creative problem-solving in the context of each organization’s specific needs. 

Corporate MOOCs will differ from the MOOCs we are familiar with from Coursera and Edx in some of the following ways: 

1. The audience size will be limited to employees, prospective candidates, partners and maybe customers, depending on the purpose of the MOOC; thus, “massive” will be re-defined by each organization. ** 
2. They will be “open” but only within the organization unless the organization chooses to make it public for specific reasons. 
3. MOOCs, while primarily “online”, can spill over into the real world, especially if colleagues are co-located. Discussions can take place in the online forum or offline over lunch and coffee. MOOC topics can extend into brownbag sessions.
4. While we still think in terms of “courses”, IMHO corporate MOOCs will consist of shorter programs designed following micro-learning principles and good instructional design basics. A set of videos accompanied by some reference links to blogs and articles, recommended books, podcasts, etc., can be put together to design a “program”. However, this will require good content curation and facilitation skills. Corporate MOOCs can also include custom-built content if the topic requires it.

**This also implies that an organization consisting of 50 employees may not need customized MOOCs. They can probably learn via more informal and social means—both synchronous and asynchronous.

Q. What is the value proposition of a MOOC in workplace learning? Why should an organization go the MOOC way?

Distributed organizations with dispersed employees working across different time zones face unique training challenges. Traditional e-learning took off because organizations were seeking more efficient and cost-effective ways to reach requisite training to their employees without the administrative overheads of running ILTs. The premise of traditional e-learning was fixed courses disseminated via an LMS. There was no scope to add context or additional information without up-hauling the entire course. Traditional courses were pushed to the employees by the organization. The employees had little say in what they received. 

MOOCs, on the contrary, while designed and facilitated by designated individuals, take on a life of their own once launched. Discussion forums, continuous addition of user-generated content, reference resources, and peer-to-peer knowledge and experience sharing make MOOCs a more democratic and fluid experience. Organizations seeking to engage the new generation of employees must look toward more fluid and participative learning methodologies of which MOOCs could well be one. MOOCs by virtue of being open can be accessed by the employees as and when they want to. Thus, MOOCs have the potential to take an organization to the next level in the journey of learning evolution. 

Note: Making a MOOC mandatory can be counter-productive. While courses can be made mandatory, a MOOC requires willing learner participation and collaboration. And these cannot be mandated. If certain programs has to be mandatory for compliance or regulatory reasons, it is best to leave them as courses. I will discuss this in greater detail in a later post. 

Q. How can an organization prepare itself to launch a MOOC? What is the ground work required to be done?

Just as putting in place an enterprise collaboration platform doesn't make an organization social, launching a few courses with discussion forums attached to them and calling them MOOCs won’t turn them into one.

There is some ground work that an organization must do before launching MOOCs. MOOCs succeed because of the communities that form around the topics and the richness of the discussions fostered by these communities. However, communities don’t form by themselves. MOOCs require efficient content curators, SMEs for technical topics, and experienced community facilitators to be successful. While fairly simple in structure, putting a MOOC together requires design thinking that puts the learner at the center. It is important that organizations recognize the need for skills like content curation and community facilitation when setting up MOOCs without which it will just be another course with a forum attached to it that no one uses.

In Part 2, I will explore the design aspects of creating a MOOC in detail. 

My 15 Most Popular Posts in 2014

As the year draws to a close, we all come up with our lists of goals accomplished, books read, places visited, and of course, posts written. Here's a list of my most shared and tweeted posts in 2014. Jane Hart's list of Top 20 inspired me to put up my own. As also Helen Blunden's list of Top Posts...(Like Helen, November seems to be my best writing month too.)

1. The Changing Face of Work and Workplace Learning (November 26, 2014)
2. The Changing Nature of Workplace Learning (November 2, 2014) 
3. Instructional Design in the VUCA World (December 6, 2014)
4. Why Organizations Must Encourage Collaboration (November 5, 2014)
5. Learning vs. Performance -- The Dichotomy (July 30, 2014)
6. 21C Workplace Skills and L&D (July 16, 2014)
7. MOOCs in Performance Support ( July 1, 2014)
8. 11 Differences Between a MOOC and an Online Course (June 26, 2014)
9. Heutagogy, Self-Directed Learning and Complex Work (March 10, 2014)
10. From Courses to Micro-Learning (March 6, 2014)
11. From Micro-Learning to Corporate MOOCs (March 7, 2014)
12. L&D's Role in the VUCA World (November 19, 2014)
13. Working Out Loud and Serendipity (November 21, 2014)
14. Learned vs. Learners (November 25, 2014)
15. Role of Community Management in Workplace Learning Today (November 22, 2014)

EDGEX 2012: About Disruptive Education

This sentence from Stephen Downes post A World to Change best exemplifies one of the key drivers behind a conference like EDGEX2012: We need to move beyond the idea that an education is something that is provided for us, and toward the idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves.

With EDGEX2012 coming up just round the corner, I must say that I am super excited. It’s getting a bit difficult to focus on my daily work, the BAU stuff and not wander off in my head to the conference. Thanks to Viplav Baxi, we finally have speakers and thought leaders like Stephen Downes, Jay Cross, Clark Quinn, Dave Cormier, et al. coming together in a conference in India.

But I am jumping ahead as usual. I wanted this to be a blog post on what the conference is and why I think all educators—teachers, CLOs, L&D consultants, policy makers and policy breakers, and anyone who has anything to do with enabling others to build capability—should attend. If you believe that the current education system is failing us, is no longer sustainable, is neither fair nor equitable, then this is the conference for you. If you have ever been inspired by the writings of Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Pedagogy of Hope), then this conference is for you. It is about disruptive education. About freeing education from the shackles of a building (call it school, college, what you will) and democratizing it. It’s about handing power back to the learners and creating the environment for learning to happen. And it will. We have experiments like the Hole in the Wall by Sugata Mitra to prove us right. 

The Connectivism and Connective Knowledge MOOC (massive open online course) that Downes, Siemens and Cormier started in 2008 exemplifies networked learning, and the transformative impact of technology on learning. Most importantly, it does not have a “fixed body of knowledge” that learners need to go through. “Rather, the learning in the course results from the activities you undertake, and will be different for each person.” And this is the fundamental, quintessential personalized learning taking place on a massive scale year after year. I had joined the MOOC in 2010 for the first time. Since then, I have been a sporadic visitor to the MOOC and have always found nuggets of learning that suited my need at the moment. It empowers you—the learner—to architect your own learning. 

Closely aligned to this, we have Jay Cross—the proponent of Informal Learning. At a time when organizations were investing in formal, top down training programs, a vestige of the Industrial Era and Taylorist ideas of productivity improvement, Cross, Marcia Conner and a few others were busy advocating informal learning, workscaping, the power of social tools and the importance of building one’s personal learning network. I find this coming together of the different strands that constitute how we learn and perceive and make sense of the world today in a single conference quite remarkable. 

The conference also has speakers like Grainne Conole, Martin Weller, Les Foltos, Douglas Lynch and others. And the overarching themes are:

1. Informal Learning, Communities of Practice, Connectivism
2. Personal Learning Environments, Open Distributed
3. Learning, Net Pedagogy, Learning “Design” in a 2.0 world
4. Learning Analytics, Ubiquitous learning
5. MOOCs, OER University, Stanford AI
6. Role of teachers and coaching in an open distributed learning environment
7. New forms of assessments

There are resources here for those keen to know more about connectivism, learnscapes, communities of practices, open design, social network analysis and more.

#CCK11: Introductory Post--Reasons for joining

I joined the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK11) MOOC a tad late. It is a 12 week course that started on January 17 and will continue till April 11. I am really excited to see what it holds. This is my introductory post. I am a bit worried that I am lagging behind in my reading but not too worried since many of the articles and posts that are linked are stuff I have already read. I am eager to go through this journey as a part of a group of people who are passionate and keen about the same things that I am.

The course syllabus was especially intriguing, and my special interest is the Adaptive Systems which is coming up in Week 7.

Week 1: Connectivism
Week 2: Patterns
Week 3: Knowledge
Week 4: Unique?
Week 5: Groups, Networks
Week 6: PLENK
Week 7: Adaptive Systems
Week 8: Power & Authority
Week 9: Openness
Week 10: Net Pedagogy
Week 11: Research & Analytics
Week 12: Changing views

Key reasons:

1. I have been reading and am highly influenced by the writings of George Siemens and Stephen Downes.
2. The theory of Connectivism fascinates me, and I see its absolute relevance in this age of networked learning.
3. I am also intrigued by complexity and chaos theory and do quite a bit of reading around these topics, which gets random at times. I tend to stray on the web. This course provides focus and a “guided” yet flexible path that will help me to do concentrated reading.
4. I wanted to experience the feel of a MOOC. I think MOOCs will increasingly become a way of sharing and learning together.
5. Dave Cromier’s video on What is a MOOC? pushed me to join. It rocks! It made me want to be a part of this learning experience.
6. The fact that I don’t need to read everything but the more I do cover, the more I can participate. This is a great motivator for me to cover as much as possible because I hate to feel left out.

10 things that Dave Cromier says about a MOOC that inspired me to join CCK11

1. The key characteristic of a MOOC as a participatory, open and distributed course
2. It’s an event around which people who care about a topic get together (although learning is not an "event")
3. All the course work gets done in areas accessible to everyone—absolute transparency of the learning process
4. Everyone gets to learn from everyone’s work
5. A MOOC promotes network creation and facilitates engagement with other participants (a key learning skill of the 21^st C where knowledge resides in friends and “knowing where is more important than knowing how or when”)
6. There’s no single path through the course—I can choose my learning path and different ideas can coexist and new ideas emerge
7. A MOOC is a lot like being on the web but it is paced, which also gives me a good reason to keep focused
8. The need to “declare” myself and create artifacts that will help me to make my learning process transparent (this post for example is a start)
9. It is a perfect blend of curated content and emergent knowledge, ideas and viewpoints
10. The 5 steps to be successful in a MOOC—Orient, Declare, Network, Cluster and Focus—are also the key learning skills required in the networked age. This, I thought, would be a great place to hone these skills. 

The points are synthesized from the following 2 videos:

• What is a MOOC?
• Success in a MOOC

So, I signed up.

What did I do next?

1. I joined the Google group here.
2. I went through the webinar recordings.
3. Saved the Twitter search for #CCK11
4. Scanned through the paper.li creations for CCK11
5. Subscribed to the CCK11 Daily

This has been my Saturday morning so far. I am now settling down with another cup of coffee to watch the 2 webinars:

• The Course Introduction and Overview
• Educational Data Mining: A Methodological Review

I will try to follow these up with some more readings from the daily. Will be back soon with my next post.