Presentation "Beyond the Buzz - Designing a MOOC for behavior change"

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the Online Learning 2013 conference with the title "Beyond the Buzz - Designing a MOOC for behavior change" based on our LeaderMOOC experience. One of the difficulties I found in talking about MOOCs to a corporate training audience is that unlike in the higher education space where this topic has dominated conversations, the corporate world is only slowly getting aware of the phenomenon. So I started the session with a 5 minute "talk to the other people on your table on what you understand a MOOC is" and put one sheet of paper on every table with some talking points and recent news from the MOOC front. It worked - but most if not all people in the room were really getting their heads around what a MOOC is and if they should spend time looking into it. And that to me reflects the 'state of the MOOC' in corporate circles at this time.

Here are the slides I used. Basically I had the audience determine what topics to pick so we didn't cover all 8 of my tips.

Beyond the Buzz: Designing a MOOC for behavior change from Bert De Coutere

My last tip triggered an annoyed "So who are you calling control freaks?" question that I may not have answered very well. I keep hearing in this conference and any other learning conference that we want to give responsibility back to the learner. Well, that means a shift in control as well : if they have higher responsibility for their own learning, they also have the freedom on how they'll achieve their learning goals and who are we to control if they have watched a certain web page and for how long?

What else is happening with MOOCs in the corporate space? SAP announced an initiative (which triggered Stephen Downes to declare the apocalypse). The interesting thing in the title of that article is 'MOOC-style course'. Indeed, the alphabet soup continues to boil and yesterday I heard Massive Affordable Online Course (MAOS), SOOC (Small OOC), etc. I'm sure that when the corporate world starts to look at the MOOC format it will mold it to its own environment and goals - much like higher education has done that with the original concept. So when will someone come up with the MOUSE concept?