«Flexible, self-directed and bottom-up: are employees overtaking their Human Resource departments with MOOCs?»
Christian Friedl Free RegistrationResumen de la ponencia
MOOCs are arriving to the business sector, especially within Human Resource Development and customer training. While some (larger) companies offer their own MOOCs, and others use external MOOCs to complement their HR offers, the awareness and perception level among HR managers in general, particularly across Europe, is still lower as might be assumed. Besides unawareness, administrative and inexperience-barriers have been identified as the main reasons. European HR experts seem to observe the development first, before taking action themselves. On the other hand, employees world-wide are already a strong part of the movement. There is a significant bottom-up movement from professional lifelong learners in MOOCs with the intention to improve their job performance, upgrade their skills and optimize their career options. As there are no specific studies available for the european context, this paper sets out to answer the research question if this bottom-up movement in the uptake of MOOCs by employees can be confirmed for Europe. It will further discuss which opportunities and challenges this would imply for both european companies and employees.
Bio
Christian is senior lecturer at the Department of Management at FH JOANNEUM – University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria. His research focuses on entrepreneurship/intrapreneurship, university-business corporation and new ways of delivering education. He is operational project leader of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Team Austria, Graduated Adult Educator (wba austria) and the coordinator of several EU-funded research projects (e.g. the Knowledge Alliance BizMOOC). He is developing business MOOCs, e.g. one on intrapreneurship which is currently in the final round of the 2018 Teaching Innovation and Entrepreneurship Excellence Awards of ICEI. Christian holds a Master´s degree in Business Administration and Environmental System Sciences, a Postgraduate Master´s degree in European Project and Public Management and is currently doing his PhD in the field of Corporate Entrepreneurship Education at the University of Graz. Besides academia, he was working in the music industry for 14 years on and behind stage.
