What Does It Take for Organizations to Adopt Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)? A Fuzzy DANP Analysis

The growing utilization of advanced technologies such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) within organizations represents change, and embracing such change begins with individual and organizational end-users who often resist newly introduced systems. Recent studies have primarily focused on identifying critical factors in educational and corporate MOOCs adoption, while the consolidation of these factors has been overlooked. With our fuzzy DEMATEL-based analytical network process (DANP) analysis, this research fills this critical gap by prioritizing the identified factors and specifying their causality to understand how these critical factors can influence the successful implementation of MOOCs training systems in the workplace. Through consensus from a panel of human resource development (HRD) experts, 20 success factors at individual, content, and organizational levels were screened. Results indicate that the individual factors are the most influential, while the content factors are influenced most by other factors under study. Results also indicate that organizational sub-factors of technical support ranked first, training on how to work with MOOCs system second, and the presence of content experts ranked third. Therefore, our study unravels the significance of ranking multi-level determinants for educators and managers who plan to embark on MOOCs to attain a competitive advantage for both the globalized economy and societal trends. We propose a paradigm for future research and practice.