Nonprofits and The MOOC Opportunity

The Emergence of the MOOC

2012 saw the emergence of well-financed massive open online courses (MOOCs). These online classes are often provided by prestigious universities, such as Wharton, MIT and Stanford. The curriculum is diverse and expansive and offered at minimal or no cost to the student. MOOCs provide enormous opportunity to the resource constrained nonprofit.

I have taken several courses on the Coursera platform. My classes included a Wharton Marketing course, a Stanford class on Organizational Analysis and a University of Virginia course on New Models of Business in Society, just to name a few. I found the courses to be well-designed, engaging and highly informative.

MOOC’s, Think of the Possibilities

Professional development is an area where MOOCs provide opportunities to nonprofits. Recruiting and retaining employees can be a challenge for cash-strapped nonprofits, even though nonprofit employees are not primarily motivated by money. Consequently, employee engagement is one of the keys to nonprofit workforce satisfaction.

Nonprofits could incorporate MOOCs into professional development by including courses in employee position objectives and aligning professional development courses and objectives with the organization’s mission. Professional development and mission alignment can help nonprofits increase workforce satisfaction and improve employee retention rates. Thus, employee professional development benefits both employees and the organization as a whole.

Robert Connolly highlights his use of MOOCs to augment higher education in There’s a MOOC For That: How My Grad Students Complement Our Curriculum with MOOCs. He referred students to MOOCs that provided higher quality classes or specialty areas not offered by his university.  Nonprofits could use a similar approach to augment needed or desired skills in their nonprofit organizations.

Professional development is only one example of how MOOCs provide opportunities to nonprofits at little or no cost. Claudia W. Scholz describes creative ways nonprofits can utilize MOOCs including;

• Professional development,
• Accomplishing your mission,
• Volunteer and Client training and education, and
• Crowdsourcing and community building.

MOOC Providers Pay Your Way

MOOC providers also see the opportunity for nonprofits to benefit from their platform and are helping nonprofits to better utilize their services. Udemy announced in July of this year a new two-part program providing monetary grants to help social-change agents create their own Udemy courses and affordable access to Udemy classes.

Research MOOC platforms and see if you can advance your mission using online courses.