What if you could offer quality training sessions for employees, with hundreds of different topics to chose from, for FREE?
What if the training was from top notch universities, from around the world, and it was still FREE?
Welcome to the land of MOOCs and online learning. For those of you that may not be familiar with the term MOOC it stands for Massive Open Online Course.
From Wikipedia: A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs).
You can check out my links below to a number of them. There are courses in Business, Management, Finance, Computer Science, Health, Nutrition, and the list goes on and on.
I highly recommend the Inspiring Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence from Case Western Reserve University. Workload is only 2-4 hours a week and it is well worth it. When I took the course, there were 91,000 students registered in the class, from around the world.
With all of these courses available why not incorporate them into training and development in the workplace? This makes sense to me as it is very cost effective.
It is a radical, new approach. I am a firm believer in life long learning.
According to Aon’s 2013 Trends in Global Employee Engagement; ”Striving to maintain a higher level of employee engagement not only contributes toward short-term survival during economic volatility, but also is a key factor for longer-term business performance and better positioning when market conditions become favorable.”
This could be a creative way to help reach that higher level of employee engagement. Depending on the course, you could schedule several lunch and learn sessions and make it social and fun at the same time.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject.
Here is a list of some of the sites for you to check out. If you know of more, please let me know.
Coursera – Huge resource of great courses…they have a bunch of courses starting in September in Business and Management.
Khan Academy – Most courses are at the under grad level.
edx – Non-profit created by founding partners Harvard and MIT.
Udacity – Variety of courses – all self paced.
Updated with more resources….
Canvas – open, online learning. Has caps on the number of people enrolled per course.
Academic Earth – Has free courses as well as videos to spark curiosity and learning.
Bright Storm – Video Lessons on Math, Science and English
Free Science Lectures – subjects include astronomy, chemistry, and biology plus more
Learners TV – Free video lectures
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