Re:Bert: LeaderMOOC Behind The Scenes: Communicating Week design

All the communicating

We are mid-MOOC now and the 4th week has gone live on LeaderMOOC: the one on communicating - one of the "fundamental four" of leadership. This is the topic that is probably the broadest of the entire MOOC: you may wonder why it is relevant in a leadership course per sé as it seems a basic skill for any profession (which is true), and the range of communication types even within the scope of leadership seems endless. As a senior leader once told me: "the more I lead, and the higher I get up the hierarchy, the more I find myself communicating." In one of my course designs, we have managers come up with a list of communication types they engage in as part of their role. Depending on the level of managers you are talking to this may include:

Giving and receiving feedback
Setting directions and delegating tasks
Developmental conversations and coaching
Virtual communication with remote team members
Strategic communication
Engaging people for a common goal
The dreaded 'difficult conversations' such as conflict handling etc

For our MOOC week we picked out only a sample. When we ask people about their managers and leaders they will often tell us "he or she needs to communicate more", "he or she needs to be more clear" and we want open and authentic communication too. If I go over the client needs we dealt with in the past year, a lot of times 'engaging' and 'inspirational' leaders come up. So why is communicating such a critical leadership skill? Because what's in your head isn't automatically in the heads of others. And even if it is, other people have another context to interpret. Leadership is about shared direction, alignment and commitment for a group of people, so that just needs often and effective communication.

A Mid-MOOC view

We are mid-MOOC now, so here is an interim status of what we achieved so far (stats taken on Oct 6):

We have 4285 enrollments - so that number went up from 3350 when we started the MOOC. It keeps going slightly up every day.
Our audience is unusual in the sense that for 1/3 it is their first online course EVER. For 2/3 the canvas.net platform is totally new and the level of technical savvy differs greatly.
But of course the traditional MOOC dropout statistics have hit us hard: if watching the opening video each week is a good indicator than we went from 1520 people who watched week 0's introduction, over 869 for week's 1 introduction and 324 for week 2. (Most people are still working on week 3 now.)
LeaderMOOC is quite serious on involvement (discussions, reflective and action oriented peer reviews), so if we take the number of people who submitted the roadmap assignment at the end of every week we went from 583 in week 0, to 390 in week 1 and 220 in week 2.
We had really insightful discussion forums and about 100 very active participants contributing a lot. It was a design risk to include so many discussions, but it worked out really well.
From the people who complete a week, about 2/3 do that 'on time', and 1/3 lag a week or more behind on the schedule. (Which is fine for about all of the activities, except the road map assignments have due dates.)
The most difficult part has been and still is the peer review assignments and how they are handled in the system.
Although we are not super-active in the course as teachers (we encourage discussion, ask some questions, reply here and there, make a weekly curated summary of what happened and send out 3 announcements a week), it is a heavy workload on the organizer's side. As the weeks go one by one, we are still working on the remaining weeks (eg the 'Mystery week' that was voted on by participants in the orientation week.) I think the core team will sleep again in November. :-)

How do you listen to the silent majority?

One of the questions that I'm trying to figure out as we speak is how to hear from the silent majority. People come in and out of your MOOC but how would you know why people drop out, don't show up, etc. Is it because it is too difficult? Are we not matching expectations? Is it time? Is it that people don't see (immediate) value? Are we doing something good, are we doing something bad? It is hard to get that information from a 'silent' majority. We are thinking of having a mid-MOOC survey to get more insights in that. After the MOOC we plan to do a Success Case Method evaluation.

But not all people are silent of course, here is some of the stuff we gathered so far that energizes us to go on: