The story of MOOCs

• 3 min read
During the past few weeks we have been talking a lot about MOOCs. I always find it useful to have a context, some history, so in this blog post I will try to give an overview of how MOOCs were born, developed, and what their future may look like.

Let me define MOOCs to start with: Massive Open Online Courses. We have published a few articles on MOOCs recently – do check them out for further context.

As a matter of fact, the first Massive Open Course, delivered Online, was created by University of Pennsylvania Professor O’Donnell by using a primitive internet protocol (Gopher) and emails. Nonetheless, the term MOOC itself was coined in 2008 by Professor Cormier (University of Prince Edward Island). The main difference between Professor Cormier’s course and the one presented by Professor O’Donnell was the presence of social elements like a blog.

It took a while for people to catch on regarding the huge potential of MOOCs, and eventually, in 2012, a massive spread of websites like Udemy, Coursera and edX joined the Learning & Development market.These kinds of platforms were seen as disruptive as they made knowledge accessible to anyone with an internet connection. In fact it looked like people could finally learn and improve their lives, for free.

Things however are never as simple as they seem. As the data collected from these MOOCs started to come in, analysts realized that the dropout rate was extremely high as a result of low student motivation, possibly (and ironically) due to the fact that they’re free, and also because of inadequate reward systems, amongst other reasons. On the other hand, it was also evident that sustaining this kind of business was going to be a challenge as it was not clear how to monetize this audience of people hungry for knowledge.

MOOCs have now evolved with gamification elements and are even leveraged by Corporate Training. During our last webinar, “MOOCs from Academia to Corporate” (email us to access the recording), a group of top industry thought leaders discussed the nature of MOOCs, different types of implementations, the way MOOCs could fit into a corporate environment, the future of elearning and MOOCs part in it. Do check out that webcast if you happened to miss it!

MOOCs will undoubtedly continue to be a hot trend in 2015. What is universally agreed is that MOOCs evangelists will have to find a way to improve user engagement and motivation to improve completion rates, and also find a business model capable of taking this strategy to the masses and making it economically sustainable.

It’s absolutely 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.In February we will be presenting a second webinar on how to create a Corporate MOOC with the Docebo LMS, and how the MOOC model can be adopted and simulated in corporate environments to enhance the corporate learning space (if you want to be invited to the webinar, email us to let us know!).

In the meantime, you can test out Docebo’s MOOC capabilities with this free 14-day trial of the LMS.