HOW MOOCS ARE BEING USED FOR CORPORATE TRAINING?

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have emerged as a paradigm in academic teaching and research. Year of 2012 has been declared as “the year of MOOCs” marking the point when renowned universities have joined their efforts with private companies in order to offer open and free, online education. MOOCs have been used in a plethora of scenarios, starting with offering entire courses and specializations and ending in blending them in university courses. Consequently, a large amount of research has been directed towards the evaluation of MOOCs’ usage and existent solutions. Big data techniques, machine learning algorithms, sentiment analysis are just a few of the techniques used to evaluate MOOCs-based teaching scenarios. One of the research subject which is still under development is that of applying MOOCs into private companies. How many companies are using MOOCs? Which are the scenarios in which the MOOCs are being used? What benefits are mainly looked after by the companies? Even if we find different state-of-the-art papers giving different guidelines about how the industry can actually take advantage of MOOCs, the application of MOOCs into industrial environments, projects and teams is still a topic that needs to be further addressed. The aim of this paper is to understand the degree in which private companies are using MOOCs. In this regard, the present study targeted international companies, but also organizations from Europe and Romania. The results are extremely promising into further developing of the presented approach.