Re:Bert: LeaderMOOC Behind the Scenes: the after-MOOC

It is about a month since the last week of LeaderMOOC unlocked. While the MOOC is officially 'over', we are keeping all content up for enrolled participants until the end of the year because we know how overwhelming this MOOC has been. Not only did people say they had to invest around 6-8 hours a week in it, we also required deep introspection, reflection on offered models and formulation of little actions to undertake to become a better leader not to mention 7 peer reviewed assignments.
At this point in time, we have finished all our remaining to-do's for LeaderMOOC - at least on the participant's side. I wanted to share with you how our 'wisdom of the crowd' experiment went, and the badge system we used to offer recognition.

The LeaderMOOC Badge

We have issued the LeaderMOOC badges last week to those who applied for it and had fulfilled all the requirements. Basically the LeaderMOOC 2013 badge is earned by those who completed 6 roadmap assignments on time and got a peer review rating of at least 2/3 on each one.

The badge was designed with the free online editor openbadges.me, a tool I would gladly recommend to design any badge. But then we needed a robust, professionally looking and easy system to award the badges. Our preference has always been Mozilla's OpenBadges because... well they are open. But we found that most tools to date that can store/host OpenBadge credentials and allow you to easily manage them and award them are still in various forms of experimentation or beta phase. There is a very popular and well functioning wordpress plugin BadgeOS, but we have been running our LeaderMOOC on the canvas.net platform and setting up a WordPress blog just to award badges was too much work. We also tried out the CanvaBadges openbadge plug-in for canvas.net and while that would have worked, it would have required us to manually go through lists of 4800 people to handpick the badge earners. (Our badge criteria do not align with how canvas.net measures progress in a course.) So in the end we went for Credly. The one downside of Credly is that it is proprietary (although they have APIs that make them OpenBadge inter-operable). The upside is that this is a freemium badge system that is complete, easy, doesn't have a beta look and just works. You set up your badge, upload a CVS file with the emails and names of those who earned it and you're done. People get a nice e-mail (see below) to tell them they have been given credit, make a free profile (can also be by logging in with their Facebook ar LinkedIn account), accept the badge and optionally share the badge on their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles.

Little Habits to Become a Better Leader

In the final week of LeaderMOOC we asked people to formulate and vote for little habits to become better leaders. We used the free and open brainstorming tool allourideas.org for that. The votes have been counted, and here are the results of our 'wisdom of the crowd' experiment. In my view it is the culminating point of our MOOC where people have co-created checklists they can now use to get our insights and good intentions into habits. Here are the top 5 ideas in each of the Fundamental Four leadership capabilities.

	What little leadership habit can you develop to be better at ... communicating? Did I... let someone finish their comments before offering mine? Did I... honestly say “Thank You”, today? Did I... stop what I was doing to focus on the person talking with me? Did I... ask open ended questions and really listen to the response? Did I... take time to show interest about what someone was feeling or thinking?
	What little leadership habit can you develop to be better at ... learning agility? Did I... create strategies to overcome obstacles to my goals? Did I ... go out of my comfort zone today? Did I… ask for feedback and suggestions for improvement? Did I ... reflect on what went well and what I could have done better today? Did I ...try an innovative idea by re-designing what is already available to me?
	What little leadership habit can you develop to be better at ... influencing? Did I... listen attentively and agreed with my team on the great things about our current process before pointing out the benefits of the new? Did I…ask feedback to get a better understanding of what works and what doesn't work? Did I...listen carefully and provide input or examples that are timely and relevant? Did I... seek out ways to build bridges with others and increase my network? Did I... gather enough knowledge about the perspective of those groups whom I need to influence?
	What little leadership habits can you develop to be better at ... self-awareness? Did I ...welcome constructive criticism gracefully as a gift and express gratitude to the feedback provider? Did I ...recognize when I was ruminating today? Did I...set some time aside each day for quiet reflection on what I've learned? Do I ...understand the emotional cues I'm having today and stop to think how it may affect others? Did I ... use one of my strengths today?

You can download the full list of ideas What Are the Little Habits to Become More Effective Leaders here.

Next: LeaderMOOC: what did we learn? (at Online Educa Berlin)

We have distributed all our weekly give-aways, we have issued the badges to those who asked for it and earned one, we closed and rated all assignments, we have our final list of 'little habits', ... So what's next? Well we are sitting on a wealth of data and experiences now, and it is time to start having a good look at all our data and make our recommendations for the future. Did the LeaderMOOC format work for leadership development? For who did it (not) work? What did we achieve? What could be a sustainable business model?
I'll be giving a first glimpse on all our data and experiences during my favorite annual learning conference: Online Educa Berlin, session GLL46 on Friday AM.

Previously:

This one has MOOC in the title

Golden advice on designing a MOOC part 1, part 2 and part 3

Platform choice and registrations

What can MOOCs mean for the corporate world?

Video killed the ecourse star

Getting enough people for a Massive OOC.

Roadmap and Recognition

Week 0 design: orientation week

Week 1 design: leader mindset

Fighting elitism, or are we?

Week 2 design: self-awareness

Week 3 design: influencing