We (= the core team of Ron, Sandrine and myself - together with a multitude of CCL colleagues worldwide) will be piloting a MOOC on leadership development to see in how far this new format can be applied for behavior change, and to scale up and democratize leadership development. But unlike other innovation projects, you can't try out of MOOC with only a handful of people. The M in the acronym is there for a reason: the MOOC needs to be Massive enough for network learning effects to occur. That makes it immediately a very visible innovation, and one where you need to involve and attract both internal and external audiences. It of course raises the bar and in a corporate setting entails some extra risks but I think is a much better model than innovation projects that happen in their protected bubble and then end up in a shelve. Here is what we have done to reach people and how it worked out.
Let's start with the end: this is a small promo video released yesterday where both our hosts Kat and Paula tell about the upcoming MOOC experience:
Getting clear about who we are making this MOOC for
One of the first rules in instructional design is to know the audience you're making the course for and adjust to their learning needs, existing knowledge, context, etc. A MOOC is by definition 'Open' to everyone, without exclusion of even your most fierce competitor. But it is not because we can't know exactly who will show up in LeaderMOOC that we can't make it with specific audiences in mind. And of course, as digital platforms allow for data collection, one of the goals of this pilot is to find out for which audiences the MOOC works out and delivers results.So early on in the design of the brand new course, we did an empathy mapping exercise on 4 audiences that we are aiming for. We know that there will be other audiences such as the 'in-crowd' of HR folks who want to test the waters and see what a MOOC can do, the 'underserved' crowd of youth leaders, etc. But we have been designing LeaderMOOC with 4 personas in mind:
- Sarah: “Give me real insights into leadership and something for my c.v.”Sarah is 20 and will be graduating next year. She’s spent some time building credentials through internships and community-based work but knows she’ll be facing a tough job market.
- Sheryl: “Help me get a good job”. Sheryl is in-between job and looking for work.
- Max: “Make me confident to lead”. Max became a manager a few years ago and is being told he needs to do more with less. He hasn’t had any formal leadership training and doesn’t expect to receive any from his company.
- Eduardo: “I feel stuck, help me advance ‘cause I have more to offer” Eduardo has worked as an individual contributor for about 8 years. He’s well known for his technical ability, but recently feels like he’s not had the chance to stretch his talents or learn new things.
Image: Ron and Sandrine looking at Business Model Canvas with an empathy map in the background during our first design meeting.
Along the way, we learned for example that our own HR folks were interested to use the opportunity also for internal development - just to illustrate there will always be audiences you didn't think of before. But making these personas really helped us focus in the design and also in the marketing channels to use.
The platform has a big impact on the audience you'll reach
As I explained in a previous 'Behind The Scenes' post, we will be running LeaderMOOC on the canvas.net platform. Using one of the big MOOC providers out there has a big impact, and in our case I'd say accounts for at least half of the number of enrolled people. These platforms (Coursera, EdX, Canvas, etc) have already thousands or millions of existing students that can promote your course for, and you'll automatically end up in web sites such as mooc-list.com as these aggregate their data from the big platforms.Spreading the word through social media
We have been mainly using social media to spread the word ourselves. We had articles on our corporate blog Leading Effectively such as Pre-announcing LeaderMOOC that explains why we will be piloting a MOOC on leadership (hint: it is our mission), and LeaderMOOC is now open for registrations. These articles have brought in hundreds of people in the immediate days after their publication.In the early days (like since July) we had an informational website open (www.leadermooc.net) and made flyers and our thought provoking postcards.
In the recent weeks, as we are building up to the start day of Sept 8 we have been building up our Twitter messages on the weekly themes of the MOOC. Our creative folks in Greensboro also made 4 funny Vine videos on each of the Fundamental Four of leadership. Some retweets and tweets by influencial people have again caused hundreds of enrollments over night almost.
For a lot of the social media spread we've been relying on our one and only Christy in our headoffice. As I know this message will find its way to you without me pointing you to it : thank you Christy!
Don't forget about your internal audience
One tip I want to give you in case you'll ever make your own corporate MOOC is not to forget communicating and marketing to your internal audience within your organisation. Not only will a lot of people want to help out and donate their time and skills to your project. Not only will people from your own company enroll and participate in the course with others. Your internal people will also spread the word to their clients and networks. One of our sales persons for example contacted some of the organisations she worked with and they enrolled many people. We also made a promotion package and spread it internally.Oh.... and I just had to try out making these mini moo cards. They are super cute, no?
So, will we reach the 1000 people we set ourselves as a goal?
It looks like we will... At the time of writing, we are 6 days before LeaderMOOC starts and we have still a full week of promotion coming up. We are at 2500 enrolled people now. So taking into account the normal baselines of no-shows and drop-outs, that should still give us a pretty exiting MOOC with a massive amount of peers to exchange thoughts with.
I'm ending with JFK singing his famous 'we choose to go to the moon' on a nice beat. Internally, we've used this mental image for our project and used this clip in lunch and learn sessions. We choose to go to the MOOC, not because it is easy, but because it is hard! (OK, a tad melodramatic, but a nice song nonetheless...)
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