The Future of Professional Development: Online, Free, and Just-in-Time
by Jeff S. from LinkedIn
As we celebrate Labor Day this week, it’s a time when many of us take stock of our work, our careers, and what changes we might want to make in the coming year.
Indeed, at some point in our lifetime we all have confronted—or will confront—a career change, a new job, or will simply realize our skills are outdated. In previous generations, knowledge developed so slowly that we could last in a job or career for a lifetime with one set of schooling.
But today, knowledge is growing rapidly by the year. Half of what is known today was not known ten years ago and the amount of knowledge in the world is doubling every 18 months, according to the Association for Talent Development. To survive, we constantly need to refresh our knowledge.
Traditional colleges, however, have not kept pace with this change in how we need to learn. Continuing-education and executive-education programs are time-intensive and expensive for working adults with busy lives. They require applications, following a rigid schedule set by the school, and end with a credential that most people actually don’t ever need to prove their skill set.
In the shadows of this legacy ecosystem, a new economy of learning is emerging. It won’t eliminate continuing and executive education programs, but it will certainly disrupt the field of professional development.
This new shadow learning system is defined by students who need to acquire knowledge quickly (within hours) and in chunks (while standing in line at the supermarket). It is supplied by the likes of the Khan Academy, which serves up 5,000 videos to some 10 million people a month, Lynda.com, which has more than 4 million subscribers for its how-to online tutorials, and even YouTube.
“A new economy of learning is emerging defined by students who need to acquire knowledge quickly and in chunks.”
Perhaps the biggest provider in this new learning system is an entity that doesn’t even realize its role—the colleges and universities themselves. Since 2011, more than 6 million people have signed up to take a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). These courses, offered for free by hundreds of elite colleges through platforms such as Coursera and edX, were once hyped as the savior to all that troubles higher education.
The narrative was compelling and inspirational: MOOCs would provide courses from the best universities to students in out-of-the-way towns who had natural talent and intelligence but had never dreamed or perhaps even heard of the Harvards, Princetons, and Stanfords of the world. MOOCs would turn education into a commodity easily consumed around the world, as universal as water and electricity. In the United States, especially, free online courses were touted as the answer to runaway tuition prices.
Reality is more complicated, however. The prototypical MOOC student is not a villager in Turkey or a college dropout in the United States looking for a second chance. Rather, the average MOOC student is a young, white, employed American man with a bachelor’s degree and a full-time job.
MOOCs right now can be best viewed as a supplement to formal classroom learning and as a tool for professional development. They are an instrument for learning, more like a textbook; not a mechanism that replaces college and drives down the price of tuition.
MOOCs are ideal for learning on the fly, and the students I met while researching my new book on MOOCs were the ideal students for the platform. But MOOCs are not for everyone, and they’re certainly not a replacement for college. Before you take a MOOC, however, you should consider the following:
- What’s your motivation? Don’t just take a MOOC to take one, because you’ll never finish. Pick a subject that you either must learn for your job or to advance in your career or that you absolutely love personally. Some MOOCs are just as dull and boring as the worst face-to-face class you have ever taken, and they can be isolating unless you have identified others to join together in a study group.
- Pay less attention to the institution offering the course, and more to the professor teaching it. Find out what you can in advance about the professor, including videos of his courses that might already be online. Think about taking the course for a test drive before you fully commit to it.
- Look closely at the syllabus. Does it have enough variety in readings, lectures, and other elements to keep you engaged for the entire class? Does the workload fit in reasonably with your schedule? While MOOCs are self-paced, they all end at some point, and it’s very easy to fall behind when you don’t have to show up to a class a few times a week or have classmates pushing you to keep up.
- Participate in the discussion groups. Given the size of many of these courses, you’ll always find a few active groups, and learning from other students is one of the best features of the MOOCs.
- Take more than one MOOC before you declare the idea a failure. The quality of MOOCs is uneven, so it’s possible that you just had a poor teacher or an uninspiring subject.
The problem is that what a particular MOOC offers to a prospective student is unclear by just reading the description on, say, the Coursera page or watching the introductory video. You can’t take a quick tour of a MOOC like you can a campus. Even so, there are extraordinary benefits to be realized if you happen upon the right MOOC for you, and for right now, the barrier to experimenting couldn’t be lower: free, but for your time.
