To mooc or not to mooc – that was the question

When, puzzled about the value of MOOCs, I carried out a very simple experiment – by enrolling on a MOOC in my capacity both as academic and entrepreneur..

What I now think of as ‘My MOOC’ is an experience that has transformed the way I think about online learning and given me huge insight into the experience of my students. But before I declare myself a convert or a malcontent, I should start with a bit of background.

I head up the Centre for Entrepreneurial at Cambridge Judge Business School and our emerging flagship course is the Post-graduate Diploma in Entrepreneurship (www.cfel.jbs.cam.ac.uk). The PGDE is the only one of its kind (the old adage that you can’t teach entrepreneurship is still alive and well) because we firmly believe that excellent entrepreneurial skills can, and should, be learnt in the academic environment. This kind of learning (in the main, we use entrepreneurs to teach entrepreneurs) can help new venturers to avoid a lot of mistakes, as well as helping established entrepreneurs to turn around or enhance their existing business.

As our clientele for this course are necessarily an international bunch, we offer most of the Cambridge PGDE programme online, to allow them to do it from wherever they are in the world and to continue to run their business while they study. Since I did my own education long before all this sophisticated online learning, I have often pondered what the experience is like – especially for a busy entrepreneur (as I have been myself). When MOOCs came along, I pondered even more about the efficacy of online learning until at last, looking for something to do during a recent sabbatical, I decided to find out what all the fuss is about and enrolled on one myself.

At first, enticed by the thought of performing really well on something I knew lots about, I considered the range of excellent courses on offer from big US Universities on topics like innovation, entrepreneurship, strategy and leadership. But then it occurred to me that my experiment really called for me to go out on a limb and try a subject completely foreign to me. Why? Because if you are a manager or a technology specialist or a member of a family business – what must it feel like to enrol on a course on entrepreneurship? As there is only this one PGDE on offer – it must feel entirely alien at first to the people enrolling on it from around the globe.  So I chose something that felt alien to me – a 6 week MOOC from the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham - on Hamlet! It’s on the www.futurelearn.com platform.

To the extreme hilarity of my children, who instantly offered me Letts notes and patronised me mercilessly with offers of help, I embarked on something I had never read and which is positioned in the minds of most non-arts people as a secondary school bit of torture.  I dutifully prepared by buying the play and reading it – when the ensuing headache would let me!  Hamlet is one of the longest plays and getting into it was tough.  However, Week 1 on my MOOC passed with great excitement until I reached the first multiple-choice quiz.

This was a terrifying moment when I realised that I absolutely had to get it right or crash and burn in front of my hawk-eyed offspring, who were circling like cute vultures, waiting for me to fail. Luckily, I managed a five out of five for the test and progressed into the following weeks. More and more drawn in, I threw away the aspirin and learnt, enthralled, about the play, its context, the actors, nuances of interpretation, the never-ending centuries’ old debates about Hamlet and his motives. I especially enjoyed how it it took me off on fascinating tangents, like diving into Youtube where there are some wonderful ‘to be or not to be’ speeches. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7TgTb_0wsg

The most serious challenge posed along the way was a peer reviewed 500-word article.  It took a while to break through the blank page on a subject I had never written on, but the ‘peers’ were gentle on me and it proved one of the most rewarding things I did. The many quizzes were easy enough – but I needed the multiple attempts the programme offered!

 What did I take away from the MOOC?  It was like opening presents at Christmas as each module unfolded and I educated myself about a fascinating subject far from my usual sphere. This is one of the nice things about online learning – the sense of achievement as you effectively motivate and educate yourself. It also gave me a whole new topic for dinner conversations!

As for MOOCs – their time has come and academic Institutions had better embrace them.  We are still on a hype cycle with MOOCs and their demise is already being predicted, with articles about how severe the drop-out rate is. I don’t know what the drop-out rate was on my Hamlet MOOC – But I know I’m sold. The key things I loved were the fabulous content with excellent delivery; the easy navigation; the good quality discussions on the platform – i.e. a good peer group - and, at 6 weeks, it was just the right length.

Downsides? There is still work to be done on the discussion forum. I am not convinced that the current platform makes this easy; you have to scroll through hundreds of participants or you end up only seeing the top 5- 10 posts and might miss an excellent post that’s too far down. Some of the quiz questions and the written assignment came as surprises – there were a few complaints about that. But, even with glitches, it was already hundreds of times better than not having access to some of the top people on Shakespeare, helping you to navigate a course on Hamlet, and without having to go anywhere or do anything other than sit in my lounge in my slippers. 

And so the moral of the story is – MOOCs work if they offer excellent, well-considered content, access to some of the top minds on the subject, a high quality peer group and a well-designed platform. If these fundamentals are in place, students will forgive stray errors. Perhaps in the end in was no surprise to find that, no matter what the delivery mechanism - whether it’s books or MOOCs -  content is still king. After all, it’s what has been keeping a weird play about a neurotic Prince set in Denmark consistently in the top most read and watched for four centuries.

That Will Shakespeare – he knew a thing or two about keeping an audience on line.

Now that is what I call entrepreneurship - e-Go

Tony – a deeply trained engineer with years of experience and Giotto a designer/engineer were flying friends and saw an advert for a competition to create a new type of plane that fitted in below a certain weight restriction. And if they could design and build something it might open up a completely new opportunity. But for them it was purely the challenge to see if it could be done.

Their good fortune was they won the competition. I bet their families did not think the same!

The plane takes on microlights – which are frankly very Wright Brothers – canvas and scaffolding mainly.  Tony and Giotto came up with a radical new design, using state of the art materials, a wankel (rotary) engine and a superb design – so it does not look like a crop sprayer from the 1950s as many light aircraft still do.

If you like iPads and great looking design – e-Go is for you!

From the design stage to see if they could do it – they realized they also had to invent production methods, build ovens to cure materials, create completely new engineering processes. This was cutting edge stuff.

Once they burnt through the meager prize fund – they continued to boot strap, using cow sheds, garages, kitchen tables and the main buzz that I got was to se how they had harnessed the wonderful talent pool around Cambridge to volunteer their time. Industrial designers, engineers, software, pilots, race car engineers, electronics, and much, much, more. At various stages of the hard long slog there must have been around 35 – 40 volunteers. Yes – OK they were fed in fabulous food and drink from time to time.  But to be honest Tony and Giotto have had a huge level of probono skilled talent to get this far.

Software start-ups are used to community-based code writing, sharing and so on. But in leading edge technology and engineering – almost completely unheard of.

The passion and commitment of Tony and Giotto is what gets them their charisma and the design and novelty just appeals to the geeks and investors around Cambridge. 

And because of their hands on approach they were also able to interlock design, build, test, re-test and finalize all at a great speed. Maybe not fast enough for their investors – but just try building a completely new type of plane from a design idea in your head on a kitchen table laptop!

Once they hit some early stage milestones – like detailed drawings, scale models, and could show progress they raised their first round of serious funding. This got them to their prototype. They are now in another funding round to get the plane into a “production” state.

Solid orders are coming in as well. There could be more but anyone who is familiar with the Everett Rogers innovation adoption curve will recognize that they need their early customers to encourage later stage adopters to follow.

Will they make money?

Hope so – they are at the very start of a completely new category and maybe it will take time to get the volume of sales going that they can feel it is a commercial success and investors are happy. But the real measure of their success is the creation of a new single-seater and surely they will create their own competitors in due course.

So two people, passionate about flying, engineering and design have gone from a “let us see if we can do it”; to raising money; researching materials, methods and systems; holding on to investors; growing a wonderful pool of volunteers; building a prototype to demonstrate it can do what it says and surely they will then go on to achieve real sales. Why not?

The project is not without risks and barriers – but it seems to me since they have got this far – they can tackle the next stages of the journey too.

Why I admire this is because it is not a low barrier to entry – website based venture. We see those around every street corner as there is an explosion of incubators and accelerators and yes of course they play a very valuable role – they create a general buzz around entrepreneurship, provide training and every so often a real venture comes out of the fog.

A company like e-Go can only be done by people who have been there and done similar things before, carry depth of knowledge and insights. What they do is create a disruptive technology  and then others can follow in due course.

http://www.e-goaeroplanes.com/

Well done Tony and Giotto