9 Lessons in Implementing a Blended Learning Approach for MOOCs Part 3

Part 3 of 12 parts

?This is part 3 of the article based on the talk “Lessons in Implementing a Blended Learning Approach for MOOCs” I delivered last May 15, 2022 at the Association for Training and Development (ATD) International Conference in Orlando, Florida. For Parts 1 and 2, please refer to my earlier post.?

Our Challenge on Online Learning

I previously mentioned in part 1 that globally, the average completion rate for MOOCs was only 15% based on Katy Jordan's 2015 research and analysis. I also mentioned that Reich & Ruiperez-Valiente revealed that online courses had an astronomical drop-out rate of about 96% on average over five years according to their 2019 article in the journal Science. We persisted and achieved a 50% completion rate in our first year. This is above the 15% global completion rate but this not good enough for a corporate university that has decided to make MOOC learning as the cornerstone of its learning approach.

OD practitioners are aware that implementing a new way of doing things is always saddled with behavior-modification challenges. But implementing online learning in 2015, way before Covid 19 forced people to stay home and do most of the work online, was particularly challenging. Some 99% of our employees then had no experience going through online learning. In fact, one of the most common questions when we first announced that we are going to conduct online learning was: “Where is the venue?”

On top of this, we discovered later that some of the supposed strengths of online learning were the same reasons why learners did not complete the online courses. For example, one of the purported advantages of online learning is that learners could do it anytime, anywhere. In reality, we discovered that most of the ?learners do not want to do it anytime, anywhere. They wanted to do it during office hours, not during their personal time or during weekends. They do not want to do it at home. They want to complete the courses while in the office.

This prompted us to use the agile approach of understanding the learner’s persona to find out the learner’s pain points and the learner’s learning journey.

Understanding the Learner’s Persona

What does the term Persona mean? In the agile approach, the term Persona is a generalized representation of your typical customer. In instructional design, the Learner Persona is a generalized representation of the typical learner of a specific type of learning content. The concept of a Persona helps the instructional designer to understand the emotional and behavioral triggers behind individual learners of a course delivered through a specific mode or medium. By mapping the learner’s learning journey, the instructional designer is able to identify the learner’s pain points, defined as the persistent or recurring problems that frequently inconveniences or annoys learners in their learning experience. This is why there is a lot of proposals to?stop using the term instructional design and instead call it learner experience design.

In our case, our learners expressed strong preference for the classroom approach. We were surprised that even the millennials who are often considered as digital natives preferred the classroom approach than online learning. When we asked why, several reasons were enumerated.

First, as previously mentioned, they do not want their personal time intruded to. They do not want to schedule online training during weekends or after office hours. There is common perception and expectation that since online learning could be done anytime, anywhere, then it should be done at home. It was not being treated in equal way as classroom training. ??

Classroom training also has the advantage of keeping the learners as “captive” audience” for one or two days. Their calendars are blocked and they are not in their work areas. ?On the other hand, online learners are in their desks are easier to disturb and get distracted. Coworkers come to say hello. Bosses come to give instructions, additional work or remind them of other commitments. Add to this phone calls or email notifications. Distractions are written all over the worksite environment when online learners are isolated in a classroom environment.

One of the most difficult to control, however, is the online learner’s urge to finish work deadlines and give it priority over completing online studies.

The learners also said that they prefer the company of others while learning. They find it boring to study alone.

They also cite as one of the biggest challenges of online learning is that they require so much attention and discipline. They find it difficult to sustain interest without any nudges from outside.

All the above findings gave us very good insights on how to structure our online learning program.?

The beauty of understanding the different learner personas is that we get very good reference personas when we ask the following questions: ?

???????Will Ibu Dwi be able to complete the course if we present the course this way?

???????Can Pak Supardi work on this assignment?

???????What kind of support will Pak Aris need if he lags behind others in completing the modules?

Understanding the Learners’ Persona prompted us to develop a “winning prototype” that would lead to 100% completion. For purposes of this article, however, I have called the elements of this “winning prototype” as “Lessons.”

End of Part 3

Before I move on to Part 4, I would like to ask the readers, especially those in training & development, if they have similarly used the Agile Process and identified the Learner Personas in their course development process? What learner pain points have you discovered? How did you address them?

You can access Part 1 at the following link:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/9-lessons-implementing-blended-learning-approach-moocs-galvez

You can access Part 2 at the following link:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/9-lessons-implementing-blended-learning-approach-moocs-galvez-1e