Dive Brief:
- Employees are taking advantage of massive open online courses (MOOCs) to enhance their professional skills but few of their employers are supporting that learning, even when it benefits their company, one observer says. Monika Hamori, a professor of Human Resource Management at IE University in Madrid, based that finding on surveys and her own research, and offered recommendations for employers in Harvard Business Review.
- While 67% of the employed learners she surveyed plan to apply their knowledge to their current jobs, only 5% received financial help from their employers; only 8% received time off to study and only 4% had coursework included in performance evaluations.
- Hamori says that MOOCs can offer many benefits to employers, from low costs and few workday disruptions to content provided by some of the most elite universities that might otherwise be unavailable to employees. Her data shows that when employers support employee learning through MOOCs, completion rates rise from 15% to 58%.
Dive Insight:
Why have some learning professionals turned away from MOOCs to develop employees' skills? Low completion rates may have given massive open online courses a bad name, but some in the industry have found ways to boost those stats by making the coursework more social. And some L&D professionals are teaming up with providers like LinkedIn, to curate content and help companies administer and track training.
As industry leaders like Microsoft and others have witnessed the value of the coursework, they’ve been developing college courses designed specifically to be delivered as MOOCs. And with the market for e-learning in the corporate realm expected to hit $31 billion in the U.S. by 2020, the model could certainly continue to see investments and fine-tuning. If nothing else, employers would do well to at least support staff who take the initiative to seek out this training.
