Exploring the impact of MOOC education

: the industry perspective

Abstract

This study analyses the relationship between Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and organisations, namely how companies are accepting this model for education and where it is considered most useful. The study comprises of five interviews to different companies, accompanied by a survey conducted by Prof. Villarroel. The results that have surfaced from this study indicate that companies are becoming more open to the idea of MOOCs, understanding the benefits that one can reap from these and how they can be used as a development tool for the company. Moreover, this study shows that MOOCs still have to improve their reputation in order to be able to compete with universities around the World. Indeed, universities had to develop their own “portfolios” of successful graduates in order to achieve their own successes. The final finding is that online courses have a large representation within companies, with many of these having their own programmes within their development schemes. This means that to be able to penetrate into companies, MOOCs need to be able to break from the existing ideas that are associated to online courses and adapt to companies’ specific necessities, such as the protection of proprietary knowledge. We expect that these findings can become a valuable contribution to the literature as well as to organisations, be these MOOC providers or other companies in general, providing insights that can be used to develop future strategies.

Date of Award	7 Nov 2014
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Juan Andrei Villarroel Fernandéz (Supervisor)