LeaderMOOC Behind The Scenes: Influencing Week design

Developing network perspective

Week 3 or the 'Influencing Week' has just gone live and is one of the weeks I was the lead designer for on our LeaderMOOC project. (We are a core team of three people and we each took the lead on several weeks, but collaborate on everything.) The week follows the normal structure of setting the stage, going into 'basics' like the how of influencing, a research spotlight which is a networking perspective (who of influencing), and the sense-making at the end through the roadmap assignment. Also influencing is a very broad skill, and what exactly to do so you influence better is very contextual (eg the higher up in the ranks the more political it gets, eg in a matrix organisation influencing without authority is quite different than in a classical hierarchical structure, etc). It is however a topic a lot of leaders are very interested in.

This week we feature one of our external guest speakers Chris Musselwhite on his Influence Style Indicator research and tool. Like most speakers, he was able to record the videos himself and send us the raw files for editing and we want to thank him for doing so. Usually we would contact potential speakers with a topic and typical questions we would like them to cover in a video and they would take it from there. Only occasionally we actually script videos in more detail. The videos from one of my favorite colleagues Phil Willburn are another story altogether. Phil and his 'roomie' (they share an office in our Colorado Springs campus) Nick Petrie have started to make low cost but high impact videos themselves and post those on their respective blogs www.philwillburn.com/ and www.nicholaspetrie.com/. The videos where Phil walks through his network diagnostic tool are edited with Camtasia Studio and are yet another kind of video we are experimenting with in this MOOC. In later weeks we'll add recorded Skype interviews to the mix as well.

How many lawyers does it take to kill a MOOC?

OK, the title is a tad dramatic. And no, we are not in legal troubles. But I thought I'd take the opportunity on this week's 'behind the scenes' to highlight the legal aspects of LeaderMOOC. You see, on our first sketch of the Influencing week we had included the work of dr Yukl on influencing. We use that work in some of our guidebooks and programs and have licenses as such. But while the talks about including it in the MOOC started well, they did not lead to a result and our legal department advised us to make the MOOC without any of his work. And so we did. Whenever you are going to organize a MOOC, the discussion of what you can use for free is going to pop up. As a rule, you can always link to pages on the web of course, but the content and people you want to include will need agreements just as you would for any e-learning course. A lot of MOOCs want to use only Open Educational Resources, but those are scarce in the field of leadership. If you would do the intake survey again this week, you'll see we had to add a sentence to the question with the leadership images. Someone from research stumbled upon this last week and insisted - although the images are published in a few places on the web already. It is a fine line to walk in a corporate context, also because a lot of people take the 'better safe than sorry' approach. The problem with that approach is that the safest way is not to do anything.

Pure to its definition a MOOC is supposed to be 'Open'. LeaderMOOC is open in a few senses of the word (eg open access and free for that matter) but not in all. The license statement of the canvas.net course is 'copyright', not 'creative commons'. (And because of that luckily we did not have to clutter every page with a copyright statement.) Stephen Downes claims that corporations cannot do MOOCs because by definition they want to be closed and not open. In a recent post he also says 'people deserve the open they get'.

Is LeaderMOOC too heavy?

After three weeks we see a stabilization in the number of active participants. We are hundreds actively following the course, not the thousands we started with. That's normal. The enrollments keep going up by the way - we are at 4200+ now. The peer reviewed assignment remains to date the most cumbersome piece for people. We as course organizers must 'push the button' after the due date to assign peer reviews but people have no easy way to find back the reviews they are supposed to make. And of course, if your reviewers have dropped from the course you won't get reviews. That is why we have decided with the MOOC team to go in ourselves and do the remaining reviews of week 0. We did find some feedback from people reacting on their peer reviews such as on this blog, so they are working out.
Another comment I got this week made me think: basically there is no 'low level' interaction possible in our LeaderMOOC. True to the way we do leadership development in classrooms, we require deep reflection and writing it out in discussion forums. Having to type in texts on personal thoughts is a heavy threshold for people to overcome. On the last minutes before going live with week 3 I tried to include some 'light' interaction activities such as a poll - but I failed because all poll tools require javascript to be entered in the text and for security reasons we can't include those on the canvas.net wiki pages. But the same thought is true for the discussion forums. The way they are set up in canvas is that you reply or you don't reply. There are no light actions such as 'liking' a post, bumping it up or down, bookmarking it, etc. I don't know if the old 100-10-1 baseline still applies, but that rule of thumb stated that in an online environment you can expect that out of a 100 people only 1 will create new content and 10 will engage in these 'light' activities. With our current LeaderMOOC design we don't really have much for the '10'. At the one hand I'm wondering if we should (this is about leadership after all, that doesn't work with multiple choice questions), and at the other hand I'm wondering if some part of the dropouts isn't caused by us scaring away people by requiring very heavy interaction.