Second, you will often find people from many different countries taking a particular course. Some of the courses I’ve highlighted in this book, such as Beyond Silicon Valley and Successful Negotiation, explicitly address cultural differences in business techniques. Professor George Siedel encourages students to partner with someone from a different country during Successful Negotiation’s final exercise. You may have an entirely different experience when you partner with a Dutch student versus a Russian, Japanese, or Canadian classmate. Even if a course you are taking doesn’t address international differences, you can and should extend a welcoming hand to classmates from different regions of the world. You can even form an international study group, complete with global videoconferences. You will find such virtual international “travel” both informative and enriching.
Many self-directed learners from around the world have also discovered that MOOCs offer an excellent way to refine their business vocabulary in a second language. Many foreign-based MOOC students report that studying in English gives them a double boost: a new vocabulary and deeper insight into the way Americans conduct business. Li, a Chinese student, says, “I mainly take courses in English because during the learning process, my English ability can be improved as well. For Chinese students interested in studying business, I think they—including me—need to be more open-minded about trying new ways of studying, and not be afraid of English-only lessons.” If you are planning to study business in a second language (as opposed to business as a second language, which we covered in Chapter 3), I suggest starting with a basic course where you already know a good deal of the subject matter. Then you can gradually work your way up to more difficult or unfamiliar subjects. In my own case, taking a MOOC on credit risk analysis in French left me with tremendous respect for students who take all of their coursework in a second language. I watched the entire first video wondering what the professor meant by the word actions. Finally, it dawned on me (after consulting a glossary of French business terms) that “action” meant “share.” The same happened with the word bénéfice, which translates not as “benefit” but as “earnings.” Unfortunately, by the time I had figured out that “benefit per action” was actually “earnings per share,” I needed to go back and watch the entire lecture again. Even if you struggle with a language, take heart. You will, in the end, pick up valuable vocabulary and cultural information even if you don’t decipher every single word.
Third, you can get a lot out of courses designed for entrepreneurs in the developing world. Courses such as Global Social Entrepreneurship (Philanthropy U via NovoEd), Innovation and Design for Global Grand Challenges (Duke University via Coursera), and Subsistence Marketplaces (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign via Coursera) focus on business solutions to the problem of global poverty, often attracting a large number of students from outside of the United States and Europe. You can use these courses to expand your horizons, grow your international network, and train yourself to use business tools for social impact. However you go about it, acquiring knowledge of the global arena can benefit you in many ways. You may end up working with a U.S. company based in Korea or for a Korean company with offices in the United States. In either case, you will learn new ways of conducting business, teach foreign colleagues new words and techniques, and make a lot of friends along the way.
Karina got some unexpected global experience when Brand Aid took on a Peruvian client, Estilo Central, which was looking to expand into the North American market by opening a flagship clothing and apparel store in Chicago. She knew she needed to understand a lot more about Peruvian culture and customs before she designed a marketing campaign for the company. Miles agreed that she should travel to Lima where she could get to know the people who worked for Estilo Central and immerse herself in the local culture. She spent a few weeks brushing up on her high school Spanish (with the help of a MOOC or two). Imagine her surprise when she found the executives at Estilo Central speaking fluent English. Still, her basic vocabulary came in handy, and it did not take long for her to pick up some Peruvian expressions and develop an appreciation for the bright colors and fine fabrics the local women preferred.
Once she had wrapped up the business side of her trip, she spent a week of vacation time exploring Lima and the surrounding countryside, even taking a day trip to an alpaca farm where Estilo Central sourced wool for its unique sweaters. She was so happy to find the perfect guide in Gustavo, a classmate from one of her entrepreneurship courses. He taught her more about Peruvian culture and entrepreneurship than she could have gotten from the best business school in the world.
Live and Learn
MOOCs are for business, but MOOCS are for life as well. Now that you know your way around the world of self-directed education, you can broaden your perspective to learn anything and everything you need to know to succeed in life as well as business. You might study a subject, such as jewelry-making or basket-weaving, just for the fun of it, or you might take a course that sends you on a whole new career trajectory, as Karina did.
At age 55, married and with her two daughters off to college, Karina decided to follow a dream that had begun to form when she was pregnant with her twins: maternal and child health. After taking two courses on the subject, Midwifery (Open2Study) and Childbirth: A Global Perspective (Coursera), she decided to retire from Brand Aid and embark on a new career in public health communication. She started her new career with a consultancy through the World Health Organization, where she could use her years of experience with branding and marketing to create communications materials to reach pregnant and nursing women in sub-Saharan Africa. Whether you do it for fun or profit, you can keep feeding your hunger for new knowledge and skills by creating and occasionally updating a Lifelong Learning Plan (see Figure 9-1).
Figure 9-1
ADVISER’S CHALLENGE
CREATE YOUR LONG-TERM LEARNING PLAN
Visualize yourself in five, ten, and fifteen years. Where do you see yourself at each of these milestones, personally and professionally? What might you need to learn along the way? Jot down a few notes about each stage, connecting your goals with specific courses and areas of expertise. Like Karina, you may make a major shift later in life.
Learn something just for the fun of it. If you’ve been immersing yourself in business subjects, you might want to take a “learning vacation,” studying something that you’ve always wanted to do.
Make learning a habit. If you’ve finished the intensive part of your business education, you should not put your learning plan on hold. Try to learn something new every year. Every January 1, Karina adds one course for her career and one for fun to her New Year’s resolutions.
Identify areas for further growth. You know your strengths and weaknesses. You can select a course to build on a strength or shore up a weakness. Karina kept taking courses that sharpened her already impressive writing skills, but she also took math-oriented courses than helped conquer her uneasiness with numbers.
Consult the learning advocates in your life. Certain friends, colleagues, and family members have encouraged your self-directed education. Periodically ask these learning advocates for input on where your learning journey might take you next.
Track your continuing education. You might use a spreadsheet or a paper journal to keep a written record of your educational journey. Or let Degreed.com do it for you. Degreed pulls data from all the MOOC platforms and can also track articles and books you read, videos you watch, and pretty much any other kind of media you might consume. It can also help you identify courses, books, and articles related to new fields of study that strike your fancy.
Watch for the Next Big Thing
If you are like most MOOC enthusiasts, you are an independent, self-directed, entrepreneurial sort of person. You may have launched a career in a field with a long history in the business world, such as accounting and finance or marketing and sales in the automotive industry; or you may have plunged into one of the cutting-edge industrie
s that did not even exist before the dawn of the MOOC, such as management and leadership in the world of artificial intelligence. Wherever you find yourself at any given moment in your career, keep your eyes open for the Next Big Thing. In 2015, the career website PayScale listed five high-paying careers that didn’t even exist ten years ago, including Data Scientist, Mobile Applications Developer, Information Security Analyst, and Digital Strategist.2 You might become a pioneer in one of those jobs or in one not yet invented. You might one day start a business in a field that doesn’t yet exist. Even if you stay in the same role in the same industry throughout your career, you can reap huge benefits from bringing the Next Big Thing into your workplace. Karina did all three: She became a widely respected authority on the latest CRM software, she brought it into the Brand Aid office, and she started a side business offering CRM consulting to not-for-profit charities.
The business world changes at light speed. So does the universe of online learning. Anant Agarwal, CEO of the MOOC platform edX, has often emphasized that edX exists not only to increase access to education but also to study how people learn online, thereby generating insight that can improve both in-person and digital teaching. A 2014 study tracked 100,000 edX learners and found that students would most likely succeed in courses featuring short videos (less than six minutes) with fast-talking professors and lots of engaging visuals.3 As these sorts of studies generate more insight, course delivery will likely change to reflect the growing body of evidence about how people learn.
Other platforms, such as Coursera, have also experimented with ways to enhance learning. Last year, Coursera piloted project-based courses, emphasizing real-world problems, and mentor-based courses, which include one-on-one feedback and live office hours with industry professionals. Karina’s college-age kids will follow their mother into the world of self-directed learning, but the MOOCs they take will not be the prehistoric ones their mother took.
Next Big Things will also alter the MOOC landscape, driven not just by the course platforms but also by the startups that have sprung up in their wake. MOOCLab.club and Mentive offer opportunities for sharing materials and joining facilitated learning communities. Degreed has set its sights on “jailbreaking the degree.” Its manifesto proclaims, “The challenges of the future won’t care how you became an expert, just that you did.”4 Degreed offers wonderful tools for lifelong learners, including ways for you to find new learning opportunities, track your progress, and measure your success.
Credentialing will also evolve. Udacity premiered Nanodegrees, edX introduced MicroMasters, Coursera partnered with the University of Illinois to offer the iMBA, and FutureLearn teamed up with Australia’s Deakin University to offer a suite of postgraduate degrees. Expect more and more offerings that make self-directed learning widely accepted and respected in the business world. Karina, our poster child for lifelong learning, followed all of these developments with keen interest. And she made sure she passed them along to her daughters.
Pay It Forward
Pay It Forward, a 2000 film about a young boy who launches a goodwill movement, shows how we can all make the world a better place by passing along kindness, favors, and good deeds. Rather than “paying it back” to the person who helped us out, we can “pay it forward” to someone else in need. The film and the concept it advocates offer a wonderful lesson for self-directed learners. You embarked on your journey toward a virtual MBA in order to improve yourself and your chances of succeeding in your business career. You can stop there, or you can pay it forward.
In 2016, the total number of people who registered for at least one MOOC grew to 58 million. Twenty-three million of those were first-time MOOC users.5 How many more people around the world could benefit from knowing that MOOCs exist? You can play a role in getting the word out by sharing your experience with other potential self-directed learners. Some MOOCs encourage students who have excelled in a course to serve as mentors for others. Hillary, the single mom and entrepreneur who appeared in Chapter 1 and again in Chapter 6, has served as a Course Catalyst mentor for several +Acumen courses on NovoEd. Look for similar opportunities during your coursework. You can also share your experience through writing, teaching, and advising, both online and in-person. All of the techniques we’ve discussed in previous chapters, from discovering where you can best contribute to growing your network, sharing your ideas, and building your personal brand, can help you inform and inspire the next generation of learners. Do any local organizations provide support to entrepreneurs, help young people learn about business, or match students with mentors? If so, join one; if not, start one. If you haven’t taught before, you may find you have a knack for imparting knowledge to others. Most self-directed learners do. As a teacher, you will likely find that you learn and benefit from the experience just as much as your students do.
As for Karina, while still employed at Brand Aid, she started her own consulting firm on the side, teaching CRM techniques to not-for-profit charities. Everywhere she went, both as a Brand Aid manager and as an independent consultant, she not only promoted this powerful software, she also championed the MOOC experience that made her an expert in the field. After cultivating contacts in the media, she arranged for a number of interviews with reporters from such major outlets as Forbes and the Huffington Post, who spread her story far and wide. In addition to writing and consulting, she also spent a semester teaching at night as an adjunct professor in the business department of a local junior college. If she could afford the time, she would do a lot more public speaking, but she has found it necessary to pick and choose her sharing opportunities. “If only there were twelve days in a week, I could double my influence. I think everybody should be empowered to continue learning! “ Of course, after she moved on from Brand Aid and plunged headlong into the business of international development, she kept putting her communication skills to work both on the job and as an advocate for self-directed learning.
POINTS TO REMEMBER
1.Keep up the learning habit by continuing to take online courses as the need arises and to remain at the cutting edge of your field.
2.Learn and grow at work by taking advantage of employer-sponsored training opportunities and by identifying courses that can enhance your work.
3.Continue to nurture your network, using MOOCs as the basis for building professional relationships.
4.Take your MOOC education overseas, virtually or in-person.
5.Be on the lookout for and open to taking advantage of innovations in the world of MOOCs and online learning.
6.Share your skills and knowledge with future online learners, and inspire them to take control of their own continuing education and career development.
CONCLUSION
Believe in Yourself
I would like to close with a confession. Before I finally took the initiative to study business on my own, I spent years feeling insecure and out of place in the world of work. When I graduated from college, I mistakenly thought I would land a great job with the snap of my fingers. After all, I had proved myself as a reliable worker, having held jobs in a bookstore during high school, at an arts camp and a national park during summer vacations from college, and even during the school year in the campus career center. But when I went looking for that dream job, I found myself swimming in a vast sea of degree-holding job seekers, all vying for a limited number of entry-level positions. After the first few rejections, I began to question myself. Why did I keep falling short? Submitting yet more resumes and cover letters took all my courage, as I began to expect that dreaded, “Thank you for applying, but. . . .”
Even when I managed to clear the almost insurmountable hurdle of getting a job, I worried myself sick about actually doing the job. Early on I won a position as a sustainable business development consultant at the International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank Group. I liked my fancy title, and I enjoyed the work, but every time I heard my coworkers talking about return on investment, due diligence, or CAPEX, I felt
like an imposter. I often thought about getting an MBA, which seemed like the only antidote to those feelings of insecurity. Once I could print those three letters behind my name, I assumed I would sail through the hiring process, waltz into any job interview brimming with confidence, wow the interviewers, accept a terrific job offer, and go to work each day with a sense of security and satisfaction, knowing that I truly belonged in the workplace. However, as I pondered the reality of investing a huge chunk of time and money in a traditional MBA program, I could not stomach the prospect of graduating with that coveted degree, only to be buried under a mountain of debt.
When I began to study business on my own as a MOOC neophyte, I quickly saw a way through my MBA dilemma. At the time, I was working as a rural enterprise and entrepreneurship specialist for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Rwanda. Again, I secretly worried that I really didn’t know enough about either enterprises or entrepreneurship to deserve my title. Through my courses, I gathered the knowledge and skills I needed. I studied the relevant topics both in general business courses and in ones tailored to emerging economies, courses such as Beyond Silicon Valley: Growing Entrepreneurship in Transitioning Economies and Subsistence Marketplaces. Almost overnight, I became comfortable discussing price-risk hedging in agricultural markets, consumer demand, and firm-level investment. The more courses I took and the more skills I gained, the more confident I felt, and the more value I contributed to my team. No longer did I feel like an imposter. I had turned myself into the real thing, a fully prepared professional who deserved her place in the business world.
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