Flexible, Self-Directed and Bottom-Up: Are Employees Overtaking Their Human Resource Departments with MOOCs?

MOOCs are arriving to the business sector. Especially within Human Resource Development and customer training. While some companies offer their own MOOCs, a few companies use external MOOCs to complement their HR offers. However, the awareness and perception level among HR managers in general is still lower as expected. On the other hand, many learners are taking MOOCs to upgrade their skills for the current job or to open up new career pathways. This indicates that employees and business learners are already making use of MOOCs on a global level, which leads us to the assumption that there is a significant bottom-up movement from professional lifelong learners in MOOCs. As there are no specific studies available for the European context, this article sets out to answer the research question if this bottom-up movement in the uptake of MOOCs by employees can be confirmed for Europe.