Top 3 learnings from our MOOC in 'English fundamentals for taxi drivers'

A few months ago, @Homuork was asked by the City of Barcelona to create an innovative learning solution to train taxi drivers in the fundamentals of the English language. 

Last week 250 taxi drivers, in an initial pilot, successfully (and voluntarily!) completed  the MOOC we created, and with astonishing results: the course had a 41% completion rate, 4.9/5 rating and an 85% overall satisfaction score.

As we prepare for the 2nd cohort of over 10.000 taxi drivers that will take this MOOC, starting next week, we wanted to share the top 3 things we've learned over the past few years while e-ducating large heterogeneous groups of professionals.

1- Apply sales and marketing techniques to learning & development (#L&D). What do I mean by that? Well, we think of the #learner as a #consumer first, so during the instructional design phase we ask questions like 'who are they?', 'what is their usual routine?, 'why are they taking our course?' and 'what is likely to change in their lives?' to understand why they invest the time and energy to take the course we are offering them. 

2- Make things pretty. Numerous studies show people are more likely to listen, understand and retain information when it is organized, structured and shown in what is called 'perceived positive aesthetics'. So we are (very) picky on creating things with brains, and beauty. 

3- Keep it useful. As you all know, #MOOCs are based on short and animated video pills. We also think of the learner as a #viewer. There is often a strong temptation when in front of the camera to make things looooong and repetitive, repetitive... repetitive. Homuork makes sure that does not happen: we script everything that goes live and are very disciplined in making our content entertaining for our users, at all times. 

These learnings are the main reason why the courses we create have an average satisfaction score of 4.8/5 and 80% of our clients our repeat customers! 

If you want to know more, contact me at aml@homuork.com or follow us on Twitter @homuork & LinkedIn