Research On E-learning And MOOCs

This research is intended to contribute to the intelligibility of e-learning and especially the new company's usages of a new form of e-learning:The Massive Open Online Courses(MOOCs).In a sense to see in which way this new online training contributes to the company strategy and help them to reach their goals.As the survival of the organization rests on the creation and maintenance of competitive advantage through training(Belcourt et al,2010)that is why the implementation of MOOC within companies can help to them maintain this advantage.In the literature and review part of this study,there is a focus on what is e-learning.This part is important to understand the main part of the study because it would be to complicated without a good understanding of what is e-learning.That is why this paper will explain its origins and usages by companies.It will be developed what are its main benefits from companies point of view compared to traditional learning(face to face).The most important benefits of e-learning are that it helps companies to reach more collaborators in less times,to minimize the logistic cost to organize trainings and reduce drastically the cost compared to face-to-face training.Also,e-learning offer more customized options and can give certifications to learners.Whereas its disadvantages are that it requires informatics equipment,establishing the content could be costly,e-learning limits the interactions between individuals,employee must have a good understanding of the use of new technologies and firms may face resistance from employees against these new trainings(Childs,et al.,2005).After drawing the importance of e-learning the study will make a major focus on a derivate form of the e-learning:The Massive Open Online Courses(MOOC).Its history,how it works and their benefits for companies.The big novelties brought by these new e-learning courses are that they add collaborative features(forums,social networks,web meetings...)and the fact they are open to all and broadcasted on the internet that allow a lot of people to follow them at the same time and reinforce the collaborative dimension(BLOM,et al.,2013).The MOOC can be used by companies for different usages according to their needs:MOOCs are a new way to improve their communication,their brand image,to train its employees but also its partners and customers(Ketkidis,et al.,2016).Some companies are using them to enhance their recruitment process to find the best profiles(Cascio,2014).In methodology part,the qualitative data is from interviews of professionals of the e-learning/MOOC industry,responding to me what are the keys for companies to use MOOC and e-learning in their strategy and the things that matters in their conception to enhance their benefit to companies.This data collection from the interviews delivered a good understanding about Chinese companies' attitude about these new types of trainings and how in Europe companies prefer to use them compare to China.Also,the quantitative data of this paper focus on creation of online survey sent to 25 000 people through email to understand better the comportment of MOOC users and their implementation within companies.The results shown(1126 respondents)that most of the MOOC users tend to be a man that has already a job,that means that many active worker like to use MOOC to perform their continuous training.Most of them are consulting this content the weekend that means off the work time.This survey shown that most of respondents want that their company include MOOC in their training strategy and feel that it can help them to progress in their career and in their job.As result for companies is that it demonstrates the demand from employee to integrate these trainings in their corporate training strategy.About the discussion of the findings part,from the online survey that I found that most of users are using MOOC to increase employability and try to progress in their carrier and that's a real added value for a firm to keep a labour force efficient.From the interviews made,have emerged all the best practices and usages to adopt for a company for lunching a MOOC project within the firm in order to maximize for them the added value of MOOCs.That means from logistic and technical point of view,providing to employee a good access to MOOCs devices(that means a platform accessible through any device at any time)with a good user experience that make the interface for learners easy to understands.The quality of the content shouldn't be neglected;this is a very important point to respect to increase the motivation of learner during the whole duration of the MOOC.The goal of the training must be explicit and must have sense for firm's employee.Also,a good community management is one of the specialties of MOOCs that emulates and maximize the interactions between learners and help them to have answers to their questions.To summarize,MOOCs have brought new usages for the e-learning:in one hand the MOOCs added value consist in training people more efficiently by collaboratives features and its more advanced technology.In the other hand the true added value for companies is that the creation of a MOOC is a new way for companies to play an active role in the society by spreading its expertise to the largest number of people.This usage allows good repercussions on many aspects of their businesses which are at the beginning of a virtuous circle.