This is a summary of the talk “MOOCs and Their Impact on Corporate Training: the edX Experiences”, that IBL’s Founder Michael Amigot gave at EC-TEL 2015 in Toledo, Spain, on September 17.
Michael Amigot ran, along with Carmen L. Padrón-Nápoles, manager at ATOS, the Industry Track at EC-TEL 2015, one of the main European conferences in e-learning.
MOOCs ON CORPORATE TRAINING
MOOCs are having a big impact on corporate training. Increasingly business organizations are considering MOOCs as part of their professional development activities, intended to educate employees.
- “Corporate universities” –over 4,000 around the world, such as General Electric, Arcelor Mittal and Apple– are building curriculums tailored to their strategies that include MOOCs.
- There is even a name for these corporate MOOCs: EPICs – Enterprise Private Internet-enabled Courses. This is reminiscent of SPOCs (Small, Private Online Courses).
- Corporate training is now delivered through online, blended or hybrid courses.
- Coursera, edX and Udacity are the main platforms that offer university-style MOOCs.
OPEN EDX’S MAIN ADOPTERS
However, Open edX is the only system that allows companies to create internal corporate platforms for MOOCs.
The main corporate adopters are McKinsey & Company, Johnson & Johnson, International Monetary Fund, MongoDB, Salesforce, HP and EMC.
They are using the Open edX open-source technology to educate employees, customers, partners, and prospects. They also use Open edX as a recruiting tool.
As an open source platform, Open edX benefits from the software contributions of universities and major companies such as McKinsey, Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm.
A PREMIUM LEARNING PLATFORM
The Open edX platform is a worthy competitor of more established LMSs such as Cornerstone, Saba, SumTotal – Skillsoft, Canvas LMS, Blackboard and Moodle.
The Open edX project is a global success. It powers major MOOC initiatives from all around the world, hosting blended and online courses.
It was created by MIT and Harvard University, and was quickly supported by universities such as UC Berkeley, Georgetown, and Stanford, and companies such as Google and Microsoft.
- Open edX makes learning easier and studying faster. It offers an engaging learning experience for learners and instructors. It has a fresh and intuitive UI, managed by the powerful “Studio” authoring tool.
- It promotes active learning by using video snippets, interactive components and game-like experiences.
- It has shown that it can scale to millions of users.
