Online corporate learning and development

Blackboard entered the education arena in 1801 and coloured chalk came in 1814. Since then the education sector has few innovations in delivery of knowledge. Ironically through this education process there has been hardly any part of our life which has not experienced revolutionary changes. In contrast, the cost of higher education has skyrocketed leaving it almost reserved for the rich only and putting many under the burden of student loans. Is the goal of education from learners' aspect like that one hundred or more years back? No, and it should not be. These days the focus is more on solving real life problems. People are keen to learn practical, global and contextual things.
The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) phenomenon is having a significant impact on higher education - especially business education. In less than two years, close to 100 leading universities and business schools have launched 450 MOOCs and enrolled almost 5m students. Involving Wall Street and Silicon Valley as partners in these ventures, these business schools are changing the rules of competition. But they are doing so at the cost of eliminating their peers. Those elite schools having MOOCs are creating a new standard for business education, in the same way they did with the case study on teaching methods decades ago. The access of a massive number of students to the learning paths free of cost is affecting the majority of business schools in the process.
In this 21st century the importance of corporate learning for continuous professional development requires little explanation. However, these corporate learning courses through the traditional brick and mortar model are no more realistic most of the time. There's a real time challenge too. The on-campus executive education cost is exorbitantly high in the top academic schools. More importantly, the gap between the skills employers need and what traditional universities teach is another big issue. In this dynamic world, imagine a situation in which an education provider takes years to update their academic curriculum and teaches the students with decade-old textbooks. Most of the executives can't leave the work and family for enrolling themselves for any on-campus full-time course. In recent days the demand for full-time MBA (Master of Business Administration) is going down and that of part-time MBA is going up. Even some top US business schools have shut down their full-time MBA offers.
Virtual learning can help address these time and cost challenges with more impactful learning in most of the arenas of corporate learning and development. Online delivery of knowledge and skill is going to be the next big disruption in education, training, learning and development of professional skills in the corporate sector. Online learning can be easily incorporated into day-to-day responsibilities. Organisations can reach employees across geographies and time zones quickly and effectively. Online learning, one of the big disruptive innovations of this century, is not limited to higher education reform. This online learning legacy could impact on the world of corporate training - which is a $150 billion industry. The corporate Learning and Development (L&D) industry is beginning to seek out the advantages of incorporating them into company-wide capacity building programmes.
Good news is the Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) or Chief Learning Officer (CLO) has joined the C-Suite as companies have realised that their single most important asset is their intellectual capital. Interestingly enough, this asset is not counted in financial statements of any company in the world. Andrew Carnegie once said, "Take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floors...Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory."
MOOCs, the biggest innovation in education of this century, formally entered the learning sphere in 2008 and gained prominence in 2012. The MOOC is "massive" as hundreds of thousands of learners can enroll. It's "open" because, anyone interested to learn can enjoy this for free. It's "online" because much interaction takes place via online videos of professors giving lectures and web discussion groups of learners. Finally, MOOCs are "courses" because they have concrete start and end dates, student assessments, online tests and quizzes and proctored exams. Yes, some of them have self-paced options to be fit for your time convenience. Flipping the classroom, first made popular by Salman Khan, is one of the defining features of MOOCs. This way the most of the learning happens not through a professor lecturing but by giving students access to course materials and having them study and explore them at home. Then in class they put their new knowledge to work with role-plays, use cases and exercises. Through MOOCs, you can learn literally each and every discipline from religion studies to computer applications, from Accounting to Zoology, from world famous professors of top notch universities to experts of relevant fields.
The Harvard University Extension School is one of 12 degree-granting schools of the Harvard University. It is offering professional certificates and liberal arts-based undergraduate and graduate degree programmes aimed at non-traditional students, as well as open-enrollment continuing education courses in 60 fields. With affordable prices, most students take one of the 715 on-campus and online courses offered for professional development or personal enrichment, 150 Bachelor's degrees and 550 Master's degrees are awarded each year. The School also has a long history of offering distance education and offers a variety of amenities and opportunities to students and degree earning alumni. INCEIF, a leading Islamic Finance education provider based in Malaysia, is offering Master's degree on Islamic Finance Practice online. Harvard Business X, or HBX, is an online learning initiative launched by the Harvard Business School in 2014 to offer online university-level courses initially focusing on college juniors or seniors as well as executives and managers in business. HBX will be enrolling 500 to 1,000 students. The Islamic Online University (IOU) is the brainchild of Dr. Bilal Philips. This path-breaking initiative utilises the worldwide presence of the Internet and advanced open sources of online learning technology to bring low-cost and university level Islamic education within the reach of anyone on the planet having access to a computer and the Internet. Thus IOU now has two separate virtual campuses: the degree campus and the diploma campus. Each campus is hosted on its own dedicated server. In 2010 the IOU launched the world's first tuition-free, online Bachelor of Arts in Islamic Studies. EdX, a nonprofit online education provider, was founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University 2012.
There are currently more than 60 schools, nonprofits, corporations and international organisations that offer or plan to offer courses on the edX website. EdX has more than 3 million users taking over 300 courses online. Coursera is a for-profit educational technology company founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University that offers MOOCs. Coursera works with universities to make some of their courses available online. It has 10 million users for 839 courses from 114 institutions. It has a course titled 'Financial Markets' taught by Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller, a Yale University Professor. 'The Age Sustainable Development' by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, a leader in sustainable development of the world from Columbia University is available on this platform. Many courses are available in other languages too like Spanish, French, Chinese and Arabic etc. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania put its first-year MBA courses on Coursera. It has an official mobile app for iOS and Android. NovoEd is a for-profit educational technology company, founded by Stanford University professor Amin Saberi and PhD student Farnaz Ronaghi. It partners with universities, foundations, and corporations hosting a variety of courses on entrepreneurship, leadership, finance and decision making to name a few. FutureLearn is an MOOC learning platform founded in 2012 as a company wholly owned by The Open University in Milton Keynes, England. This first UK-led MOOC learning platform has included 36 UK and international university partners and four non-university partners: the British Museum, the British Council, the British Library and the National Film and Television School. The Institute of Islamic Banking and Insurance (IIBI), a not for-profit company incorporated in the UK, is offering certificate, diploma and postgraduate diploma courses online.
Udemy is another amazing online learning platform for professionals. Udemy provides tools for experts of any kind to create courses which can be offered to the public, either at no charge or for a nominal tuition fee. Interested learners take courses largely as a means of improving job-related skills. Udemy has made a special effort to attract corporate trainers seeking to create coursework for employees of their company. The online learning marketplace currently has more than 10,000 instructors teaching 18,000 courses on a range of topics-everything from yoga to photography to Microsoft Excel to Apple's Swift programming language. Udemy for Business provides training solutions to over 2,000 companies in the world. The Drucker Institute has gone under partnership with Udemy to provide a series of management courses based on Peter Drucker's timeless wisdom. The courses are ideal for management professionals seeking to improve their personal and organisational effectiveness at their own pace and without the constraints of a formal classroom setting. Udacity is a for-profit educational organisation founded by Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens and Mike Sokolsky offering MOOCs. While it originally focused on offering university-style courses, it now focuses more on vocational courses for professionals. AIMS' Institute of Islamic Banking and Finance is a UK-based world's leading institution for Islamic finance studies. They have designed online programmes like 'Certified Islamic Finance Expert' and 'Master Diploma in Islamic Finance.'
Many corporations around the world have already adopted this online learning approach for corporate L&D encompassing all of the stakeholders from employees to customers and even suppliers. Pepsico has corporate partnership with Udemy for their corporate learning and development. Adidas is going to integrate the online courses into their internal learning offerings. Insurance company JLT employees have participated in Coursera's Introduction to Public Speaking, Introduction to Operations Management and a couple of introductory finance courses. EdX is being used by the steel manufacturer Tenaris in its Tenaris University to deliver learning to 27,000 employees. Udemy and others already serve this market. Aquent, a staffing agency for the marketing and creative industries, recently launched Aquent Gymnasium, an MOOC provider that offers technology courses for creative professionals. Job search site 'The Muse' has expanded into MOOCs. Business management software company SAP offers several MOOCs for developers including 'Introduction to Software Development on SAP HANA.' Ethica Institute of Islamic Finance has an online course, 'Certified Islamic Finance Executive.'
McAfee has saved some $500,000 a year switching to an MOOC-centric sales training. Udacity has collaborated with companies like Google, AT&T, Autodesk, Cloudera, Salesforce and NVidia. The participant companies have each pledged $250,000 toward developing MOOCs to bridge the gap between what students learn in traditional universities and the skills employers are seeking. Yahoo! sponsors its employees to earn verified certificates through Coursera's Signature Track programme. The company partnered with Coursera as a way to encourage employees to continue to develop their technical skills so that they can apply them toward designing and creating new innovative products. In addition to internal training, learning and development, customers can learn how to use your product and you can develop a closer relationship with them. Bank of America has gone under partnership with Khan Academy creating a series of self-paced courses for Bank of America's customers on how to develop better money habits.
The 'certification' argument doesn't really matter that much in this practical world. The purpose of knowledge is action for life. So, companies want skills and competences, not bits of paper. This is often a message lost in many of our education providers. The blended MOOCs can be a real option for corporate learning delivering other components internally to balance the purely online nature of an MOOC.
Yes, Bangladesh is also advancing in this journey of innovative education. Some creative change makers are coming forward to promote this timely demand. Bangladesh Institute of Management (BIM) has launched e-learning services offering online courses like e-commerce, database management, data communication, system analysis and operating system etc. Centre for Professional Development Bangladesh, an education service initiative of Drik ICT, also provides instructor-led e-training, webinars, self-study courses, e-learning on-demand courses etc.
Using MOOCs in corporate learning and development is a win-win phenomenon for all stakeholders. For MOOC providers, training courses are a possible source of revenue, while for organisations they represent a way to deliver more effective training more quickly and at a reduced cost. For companies looking for new ways to deliver training, engage employees more meaningfully in the learning process, or offer more flexible and accessible training solutions. Now is the time to adopt MOOCs in corporate learning and development or risk falling behind.
The writer is working at the R&D of Islami Bank Bangladesh Ltd and pursuing Executive MBA at the IBA-DU.
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