Analysis: Go the distance? (DRAFT)

Based on article appeared in November/December issue of European Rubber Journal magazine.

French rubber-industry training body IFOCA is launching a series of on-line training courses, starting with the first rubber technology MOOCs (massive open on-line courses) in Europe.

The MOOCs will be available in French – with other languages to follow – from February 2016, Christian Caleca, directeur general of the Centre Français du Caoutchouc et des Polymères, said at the ETRMA skills seminar held in October.

Two paid-for options are also in the pipeline: SPOCs (small private online courses) and COOCs (corporate online courses), which provide dedicated training for a single organisation or company.

Caleca went on to describe this “digitisation of learning” as a significant new tool to bridge the skills gap in the rubber industry.

At the same seminar, however, professor Andras Szucs, secretary general of EDEN (European Distance and E-learning Network), said that while e-learning was now a major educational movement, it offered only limited benefits for the rubber industry.

“MOOCs and open learning: what is new in this?,” he asked “Access to knowledge has, to a large extent, always been more-or-less free [in libraries].”

More pointedly, presenter Mauro Velardocchia of the Politecnico di Torino said MOOC students generally fail the exams, and that just one-in-ten actually finish these courses. And, he said, of those doing MOOCs 80 percent already had a degree of some kind.

While MOOCs could be a valuable supplement to classroom learning, he concluded “in my opinion, they are not an alternative to knowledge-based team learning.”