MOOC’s and Open Online Learning
By Eric Kaulfuss, Learning Manager, Cigna
Open Online Learning is one of the key channels that we use to educate our employees. The idea was to replace static, high cost, outdated, deck driven courses with dynamic, relevant curated web based learning experience. Our shift was the result analyzing the poor usage and ratings of our previous skills based learning, and then taking a user experience based approach by asking “how do our employees learn outside of Cigna, and can we replicate or improve on it?”. The result was to mirror the home learning experience where employees tend to turn to search engines, and YouTube for skills and MOOCs like those provided by Coursera and edX for more advanced, career oriented development. We replaced the top 100+ courses based on volume, as well as several programs like Project Management. We now have a curated group of over 900 free courses, articles and videos that users can access via the LMS. In addition, through our Great Places to Learn JAM group, we offer links to 19 providers offering thousands of other free courses. Our plans for the future include working with users to identify new material and assist in the curation process.
