Dive Brief:
- Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are starting to lose some of their popularity with companies that use them to augment workforce learning efforts, according to the Association for Talent Development (ATD).
- In 2014, ATD research indicated that more than one in five learning and development professionals had used MOOCS, but recent data from U.S. News & World Report shows a decline: A little more than 60% of institutions said they would not offer MOOCs in 2015.
- Six in 10 organizations who use MOOCs don't actually build and launch them alone; MOOCs are often produced collaboratively with public institutions, and a lack of institutional support might indicate that employees have fewer ways ot deliver such courses. Additionally, about one in six adults have admitted to quitting a MOOC before completion.
Dive Insight:
MOOCs have been at the forefront of the eLearning market, and emerged as a source of freely available education that any individual or organization can utilize. The problem has been that topics have been somewhat limited to college-level learning, that is until recently, when more instructors began creating their own courses to share.
MOOCs have provided an opportunity for some companies to augment their current in-house learning methods, and have spurred the increased use of learning management systems. While things may be slowing down somewhat as the MOOC market is getting saturated with some content areas, others are just emerging, so the plateau predicted by experts not quite be here yet.
