MOOCs And Their Role In Your IT Client's Business

By Ally Kutz, contributing writer

With more than 2,400 courses being offered by more than 400 universities to between 16 and 18 million students in 2014, MOOCs are on the rise. MOOC — Massive Open Online Course — was developed in 2008 and has been growing at impressive rates ever since.

The numbers certainly don’t lie — with the value of the global e-learning market expected to rise to $50.5 billion next year, up from $35.6 billion in 2011, MOOCs are the way of learning for the future.

While many MOOCs are oriented toward subjects like math and literature analysis, there is a rising number of courses offered in information technology, marketing, human resources, and finance, some of which are offered for free or at low cost — and all of could be beneficial to businesses.

Suvit Chansrichawla, HR consultant with Serendipity & Co., says,.”MOOCs can help develop your partners, suppliers, and future talent effectively and at scale. Even though learner completion of MOOC is less than 10 percent, it is here to stay.”

As a VAR, it is important that you make sure your clients that want to take advantage of this opportunity are are equipped the support MOOCs within their corporations. Hardware that your clients may need includes computers for learners with software, which could be Web-based. If your client is producing their own training programs, they will need microphones, cameras, presentation capture solutions, and servers on which courses are stored.

Big Data analytics could be another need among providers and users of MOOCs. Talent LMS says that “numbers in eLearning are becoming so large that processing user generated data using traditional methods is becoming impossible.”