Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Education in the Age of the MOOC

In May 2011, mediator, arbitrator, and consultant Christopher Honeyman gathered a small group of negotiation teachers to address a particular challenge: the knowledge and skills we teach are basic life competencies. How can we share these with those people who will never, ever be students in our negotiation courses?

In response, five of us collaborated to write a book chapter entitled “The Education of Non‐Students” (Blanchot et al. 2013) that was published in the fourth volume of a series of books exploring recent developments and issues in negotiation pedagogy (see Honeyman, Coben, and Wei‐Min Lee 2013). In that chapter, we suggested embedding elements of negotiation education within popular media — films, theater, and games.

But my intuitive response to Honeyman's initial question at that first meeting was that perhaps we should reconsider the underlying premise that most people would never study in our classrooms. Would they, I wondered, if we were able to significantly change our classrooms?

At that point I had taught negotiation online for several years and had seen the educational capacity of online learning. I knew that many traditional limitations on access to education — first and foremost, geography — had been diminished if not eliminated. The impressive geographic diversity of the students in my online introductory negotiation and dispute resolution course notwithstanding, however, such courses still typically serve only twenty to thirty students. Merely offering negotiation courses online would not create the “sea change” required to meet the challenge that Honeyman had posed.

In 2011, two Stanford University professors offered a course on artificial intelligence not only to enrolled Stanford students in their classroom, but also to anyone wanting to take it over the Internet. Nobody—least of all the teachers—foresaw that 160,000 students would enroll from around the world. This phenomenon catapulted the massive open online course (MOOC) to the forefront of attention in higher education and beyond.¹ Throughout 2012 (colorfully dubbed “The Year of the MOOC” by the New York Times) other universities offered MOOCs of their own, and three MOOC development service providers formed.²

Just what is a massive open online course? While various subtypes exist, common elements include:

• unlimited enrollment capacity (hence the possibility for “massive” enrollment),

• the absence of admissions requirements (hence the “open” nature — anyone with access to the Internet can enroll), and

• an Internet‐based learning platform (i.e., an “online course”).

Beyond these core characteristics, MOOCs vary widely. Some involve “live” instructors actively interacting with students; others are completely automated, with variations in between. Some set fixed start and end dates and impose deadlines designed to keep all students working on the same thing at the same time; others are self‐paced or on‐demand. And, while MOOCs are tuition‐free by definition, some offer fee‐based add‐ons, such as certificates or statements of completion.

Since inception, MOOCs have generated debate, much of which has centered on their impact on contemporary higher education. Skeptics have questioned their academic value because they lack so many of the controls and feedback mechanisms traditional classes offer, but other commentators have suggested that MOOCs can be developed in ways that ensure educational quality.

The widespread adoption of MOOCs could also have significant financial ramifications, potentially slowing the steadily rising costs of obtaining formal degrees, which has led some to argue that higher education should embrace MOOCs for their efficiency.³ Many universities have invested money in the creation of MOOCs and some have invested even more in the development of MOOC platforms and consortia (see The Economist2014a,b). Although discussions over the relationship between MOOCs and higher education have certainly drawn attention, most have not addressed MOOCs’ capacity to disseminate knowledge more broadly and to have an impact beyond the populations conventionally served by colleges and universities.

A distinguishing characteristic of MOOCs is that they have the potential to equalize the participation playing field by eliminating such barriers as cost, age, prerequisites, or competitive admission policies. Some barriers may remain, however, because access to the Internet is far from universal, and bandwidth, Internet regulation and censorship, and inability to speak the language the course is offered in may all limit participation.⁴ These limitations notwithstanding, the advent of the MOOC has undeniable potential for allowing unprecedented access to many university courses. Proponents of MOOCs have lauded them as the ultimate educational equalizer. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (2013) wrote, “Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world's biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive, online open courses, or MOOC platforms that are being developed.”

But this great equalizing potential has yet to be realized. Demographic data on the students who have enrolled in MOOCs thus far shows them to be mostly young, well‐educated, employed males, from developed countries (Christensen et al. 2013; Selingo 2014; Ho et al. 2015).

Students choose MOOCs for a variety of reasons. As noted above, MOOCs are free, and offer many students the only way to take advantage of the course offerings at a prestigious university such as Stanford or of courses taught by an internationally recognized expert. Because of the potential geographic diversity of their enrollees, some of these courses may allow students to access a broader social and professional network than a conventional course would, and, like other online courses, they can be taken at home and with a great deal of time flexibility. (For more on student motivations for taking MOOCs, see Zheng et al. 2015.)

Although many students have been motivated to enroll in MOOCs, far fewer have been motivated to complete them. One report shows that completion rates are generally between 2 and 13 percent of enrolled students (Perna et al. 2013); others suggest an average completion rate of 10 percent (The Economist2014a). Some researchers have suggested that students do not initially enroll in the course with the intention of actively participating in it to completion, and that keeping student intent in mind is vital in assessing course completion data (Koller et al. 2013). Nobody has yet determined, however, what these students hope to gain from their partial participation, or how they might be encouraged to continue to participate. The gap between enrollment and completion rates has caused many to question the educational benefits of MOOCs as well as their potential to transform higher education (see, e.g., The Economist2014a).

A possible explanation for MOOCs' low completion rates is the free price‐tag. If people pay for something, this reasoning goes, they treat it more seriously; with no “sunk costs,” students find it easier to walk away from MOOCs. Would completion numbers go up if MOOCs were not free? Perhaps, but this adds a significant barrier to their openness and the number of students completing the course could stay the same or even drop, but the percentage of completers would rise because fewer people registered for the course in the first place. In fact, most MOOC providers have shifted to for‐pay models of taking MOOCs, by offering free auditing or participation, while charging for course completion certificates that might add value to a student's portfolio (certificates that were, until recently, awarded free of charge) (Shah 2015).

Another explanation for low completion rates is MOOCs’ limited credential value. They generally do not grant academic credit and have not been formalized in degree or professional certification programs and, for the most part, have gone unrecognized by employers, although many MOOCs do offer students certificates of completion.⁵ Some providers have also clustered MOOCs into “MOOC Pathways” or “MOOC Concentrations” to convey academic depth in a particular topic or discipline, but whether issuing such credentials has actually enhanced their holders' standing remains undetermined. Moreover, the leading MOOC providers now charge fees for such concentration certificates. We currently do not know whether gold‐standard credentialing and recognition or charging students for participation or credentials will lead to higher completion rates, or whether such moves will backfire. As the initial hype about MOOCs has died down and given way to research, we can hope to see more grounded discussion emerging between MOOC skeptics and proponents.

I do not, in this article, purport to fully explore the MOOC phenomenon, to support either side in the MOOC debate, or to consider MOOCs’ long‐term relationship to higher education. Instead, my focus here is on the potential that MOOCs might offer to the negotiation and conflict resolution field in particular. For this purpose, I must raise and address two other general, interrelated and important sets of questions educators often ask about MOOCs:

1. What is their educational purpose? Is it raising awareness, teaching basic knowledge, supplementing traditional academic courses, or supplanting them?

2. What can be taught with MOOCs? Are they suited for some topics, and not for others? Can they deeply address complex issues? Can they modify behavior or enhance skills, beyond imparting knowledge?

Although many commentators have expressed strong opinions in response to these questions, we do not yet know the answers. No definitive MOOC guidebook exists. As of this writing, no data support either their efficacy or lack of it. Thus every new MOOC—particularly in a new area or with a new purpose—contributes a bit of experimentation and expands our knowledge of this method. My own exploration, implementing a MOOC for negotiation education, began shortly after the more general MOOC phenomenon emerged.

In 2013, Creighton University, where I teach, decided to conduct its first MOOC and issued a call for proposals to faculty. My proposal for a MOOC teaching basic negotiation concepts and skills was selected, based on a survey of alumni showing that a majority of them found this topic to be the one most likely to interest them. Thus, “Negotiation: Navigating Professional and Personal Interactions” (or “NegMOOC”) was born.

Creighton University and I had complementary interests in offering a MOOC. The university wished to explore what might be done with MOOCs and what is involved in conducting them. The university decided that while the course would be open to the world at large, it would target alumni as potential course participants and limited its own publicity efforts to contacting alumni.⁶ My own exploratory agenda motivated me to propose and conduct the MOOC: Can topics of negotiation and conflict resolution, specifically, be taught through this vehicle? If so, what are the implications for our field?

I framed this inquiry, in four questions, which I will share up front to provide context for many of my course design decisions, and answer in detail in the latter part of this article:

1. Can we provide the same quality of negotiation education using a MOOC format that the field provides in its traditional and online (small‐scale) classes?

2. Can the signature pedagogy of the negotiation field, the experiential learning model, be implemented in a MOOC?

3. Can we provide students in a MOOC the same experience that has made negotiation courses so successful and popular with classroom students—complete with high volumes of meaningful interpersonal interaction?

4. Assuming positive answers to the first three questions, what implications might this have for negotiation and dispute resolution education? What strategies could the field consider? How could this affect individual universities and programs?

To gain input from the field and not rely solely on my own experience, I spread news of the course on alternative dispute resolution (ADR), negotiation and conflict resolution web sites, groups and listservs, including ADRHub.com, the Peace and Collaborative Development Network, the American Association of Law Schools listserv for Dispute Resolution in Legal Education, and Indisputably.org. I invited professors, students, and practitioners in the field to participate and to share their ideas.

Because MOOCs are so new, best practices for design and pedagogy are non‐existent. Many universities have hired service providers to help develop and host MOOCs, supplying a development model, guidance on preparing materials, production services, and a learning platform. However, the price charged to the university is often quite high.⁷ Creighton chose to host the course on the Canvas.net platform, which is offered for free but which provides less pedagogic and design guidance than for‐fee providers.

For me, this arrangement had pros and cons. On the one hand, I gained pedagogic freedom: within any constraints posed by the medium, I could do anything I wanted to without being told “That's not how we do it.” On the other, I did not know how best to use this freedom. Thus began a long process of figuring each step out. Choosing this platform also affected the size of the course; the larger providers market courses more actively than Canvas.net. But overall, this choice enabled me to experience “independent” MOOC development, which I think is likely to be more typical of most teachers’ experiences: I suspect many would receive some support from their university or other sources, but fewer work for schools with the resources available to work with the more expensive platform operators.

Having designed and taught many online courses, I was familiar with the usual challenges to teaching and learning in this environment:

• teachers do not meet students face to face;

• time zone differences challenge any synchronous interactions; and

• many students are enrolled in an online class (or, in this case a MOOC) for the first time; more experienced students may not be familiar with the course's particular learning platform.

These challenges, I knew, would arise in a MOOC context, but be magnified by the size of the course. I at least had some experience and resources for dealing with them. In designing NegMOOC, however, I identified several new challenges. They included the following.

Students Have Different Reasons for Enrolling: Students in any class might have somewhat different purposes, but students who enroll in MOOCs are likely to have a far greater range of motivations. (For example, I learned that some students hoped to become skilled negotiators on the job, while others saw the course as the path to a new career, and still others hoped it would help them with negotiations in their personal lives; see discussion of student demographics later in the article for more information.) This poses a challenge: to design a course that will provide value to people who seek widely varied results.

Students Have Different Participation Intentions: Every course includes a variety of students: active and passive, introverted and extroverted, enthused and subdued. Some come to class regularly, others will do anything to stay away. They have varied learning styles, which they implement as they participate. In a MOOC, up‐close class management and personal monitoring is challenged by scale, so special attention was required at the course design phase, to determine what course structure, material, and activities would work best for students with diverse participation intentions and learning styles.

Students Vary in the Amount of Effort They Are Willing to Extend: In academic courses, students’ extrinsic motivations (passing the course, maintaining a grade point average, etc.) give teachers some leverage. How does the teacher ensure good outcomes without this? I could not assume students would comply with any of the usual requirements, such as reading assigned material or even obtaining a textbook, or anticipate whether they would participate for one hour a week or for six. Course designers must ask themselves: “How can this course be designed so as to provide real (if differential) value to everyone taking it — whether they dedicate an hour or six hours each week?

The Number of Students Challenges Assessment: Instructors employ many approaches to assessing negotiation students, many of which are labor‐intensive (Ebner, Efron, and Kovach 2012). Because the sheer scale of a MOOC prohibits labor‐intensive options, teachers have generally adopted two assessment models: automated multiple choice quizzes graded by the system and/or a peer‐assessment system. Negotiation teachers have advocated the use of both quizzes (Ebner and Efron 2012) and peer assessment (Coben 2012; Welsh 2012) to assess negotiation students, but relying on either of them as a stand‐alone method can be problematic (Northcutt, Ho, and Chuang 2015; Young 2012). Designers of MOOCs must overcome the assessment challenge before this method can gain pedagogical and academic credibility. At the individual course level, each designer must consider which mechanism will work best, in the context of the course, to provide meaningful assessment.

There Are No Models or Best Practices for Course Design: Because of MOOC's novelty, when I was designing NegMOOC I could find no literature describing systematic approaches or proposing design recommendations.⁸ Providers kept their workflows to themselves, and no research existed to show these models to be valid. I was concerned that design would be no more than a shot in the dark.

The easiest choice would have been a fairly simple course design that would deliver basic content: a top‐down course, relying only on videotaped lectures as sources of information, self‐paced, with little interaction between teacher and students and even less between classmates, with little teacher intervention in real time, and no interactive exercises requiring close monitoring such as negotiation simulations. This course model, known as an “xMOOC,” is favored by the large MOOC providers.⁹

As any negotiation educator knows, such a design would run counter to much that is considered essential to good negotiation education.¹⁰ Therefore, I chose to modify that approach and tailor it to negotiation education and my own goals, creating a model that I call an “interactive xMOOC.” This model incorporated four pedagogical elements absent in typical xMOOCs. These are as follows.

Immediacy and Social Presence: Students enrolled in MOOCs typically lack a sense of teacher presence, that is, they perceive a great distance between themselves and the course's teacher, which is often lamented as a MOOC shortcoming (Jacobs 2013). This distance runs counter to effective online teaching (Lehman and Conceicao 2010) as well as to the style of teaching adopted by the typical negotiation teacher. To enhance immediacy and social presence, I decided to rely heavily on video rather than text, and developed videos, written materials, and course explanations that would also enhance interactivity (which is an element of social presence). My desire to encourage immediacy and enhance social presence at the student‐to‐student level also affected the course design.

Interactivity: Traditional negotiation classrooms are rich in teacher–student and student–student interactivity. The scale of MOOCs directly challenges interactivity, and in the xMOOC model teachers often do not interact with students directly at all. They convey information solely through pre‐prepared video, and discussion forum interactions are often an add‐on feature rather than a core learning activity. How to encourage high‐volume and high‐quality interactivity was one of the challenges that originally motivated me to conduct NegMOOC. To address this challenge, my design gave discussion forum participation center stage in NegMOOC's educational plan, and made participation a certification requirement (see below). I also sought to encourage student–student interactivity with student‐driven forums (for social interaction, mutual help with tech issues, etc.) and by making a simulation one of the course's core components.

Experiential Pedagogy: A core goal was to explore whether the most commonly used pedagogical model for teaching negotiation could be implemented at scale. In the experiential learning model, as described by David Kolb (1974), students undergo the cyclical four‐stage process shown in Figure One.

Roy Lewicki (1997) illustrated how this method is typically adapted for teaching negotiation, as shown in Figure Two.

I decided that no matter how challenging its setup, conduct, and debriefing would be, the course would include a negotiation simulation. Conducting simulations online poses no insurmountable challenges (see Matz and Ebner 2010). Committing to doing so for hundreds of participants, however, presented a new set of scale‐ and labor‐related challenges to overcome — but an invaluable exploratory opportunity for negotiation education.

Relying on a series of simulations to provide concrete experiences for each topic to be covered (as is the norm in negotiation courses) was impractical. To develop alternative sources for concrete experiences, I decided to draw upon each student's own negotiation history. Each week, students’ primary discussion forum assignment would involve relating a concrete experience of their own, reflecting on it, applying the concepts in the reading material, and identifying areas for future improvement. Each weekend, I would prompt students to identify an upcoming negotiation in which to implement their insights — providing opportunities for goal‐setting and implication‐testing. NegMOOC's experiential cycle is depicted in Figure Three.

Variety: In addition to my own lectures, I invited a dozen negotiation practitioners and academics to prepare video lectures or record video conversations with me, introducing multiple voices to the course. I also encouraged the course's six teaching associates to share their own views about negotiating in the real world. (See section on support and staffing below for more information about the teaching associates.)

The four pedagogical elements noted above guided the course's ultimate structure and content. Because of students' varied intentions with regard to time investment, I chose to include modular elements so that students would benefit from any individual bite they took, even if they did not clear their plate.

The result was a four‐week design, with each week constituting a discrete unit, which then included four discrete sections. Participants were free to engage with any or all of these units, and with any or all of a unit's individual sections, according to their own preferences, and gain a stand‐alone learning experience from each, focusing on self‐reflection, content learning, or both. Each unit's “Main Unit Content” section introduced a central negotiation topic. Students wishing to explore that topic in greater depth were encouraged to engage in an “Initial Reflection” exploring their own initial and intuitive approaches to the central topic, and identifying pertinent episodes from their own lives to provide context and a backdrop for the week's main material. Students wishing to study still more about the week's topic could pursue the “For Further Exploration” section, which includes short articles, video lectures, and videos of negotiation role plays for viewing. Finally, students seeking knowledge of other areas of negotiation not covered in the “Main Unit Content” could study each unit's “Digging Deeper” section, in which a separate, but somewhat related, topic was introduced.¹¹

The core content of the course reflected the six central themes that Chris Honeyman and Andrea Kupfer Schneider (2004: 643–644) identified as common to all negotiation courses:

• personal style, strategy, or personality (i.e., competitive or adversarial vs. interest‐based or principled or problem‐solving orientation);

• communication skills — both listening and talking;

• integrative versus distributive negotiations;

• bargaining zone, best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA), and reservation price;

• brainstorming and option creation; and

• preparation.

Additional topics, covered in the “Digging Deeper” sections, included negotiation ethics, negotiating online, and mediation. Table One depicts the course's content structure.

The course was asynchronous — no events or interactions took place in real time. Students could log onto the course at any time, study and engage, which enabled them to participate fully regardless of time zones, work hours, and family commitments. The course was not intended, however, to be self‐paced. The one‐unit‐per‐week schedule, with open and close dates set for each module, ensured that students progressed through the course as a class, focusing together on a different topic each week.

The teaching material included different types of video: studio‐recorded lectures, classroom‐filmed lectures, voice‐over presentations, video recordings of role‐play negotiations, guest presentations and interviews, and animated negotiation scenarios that I created together with the instructional design expert Creighton dedicated to the course (see below). Each weekly unit featured a variety of these types of video (although not every type was included in every week). Altogether, I created nearly one hundred videos — more than seventeen hours’ worth — for the course.¹² I also assigned students 140 pages of reading material, most of which I created especially for the course.¹³

Course activities broke down into four types: independent learning, interactive asynchronous group‐based learning, a negotiation simulation, and quizzes.

Independent Learning: Conducted by each student independently, these activities included reading short articles, viewing videos (lectures, interviews, discussions, and vignettes of negotiation simulations), and responding to self‐reflective questionnaires.

Interactive Asynchronous Group‐Based Learning: Each week we offered students three different online discussion forums to interact in: the first focused on the initial reflection, the second on the week's main topic, and the third on the “Digging Deeper” topic. Each forum included an initial trigger‐question or prompt, framing the topic of discussion and giving guidance for responding to it well. As discussed below, the teaching associates and I were frequently present and engaged in these discussions.

Negotiation Simulation: Throughout the third week of the course, students could opt‐in to a negotiation simulation, be assigned a counterpart from among their classmates, and jointly receive access to a course area providing them with videoconferencing, text messaging, or discussion forum options for conducting the simulation in Week Four.¹⁴ The simulation used was Live8.org (Ebner 2009), in which a U.S.‐based organization negotiates with a Turkish company over usage of an Internet domain name.¹⁵ After completing the simulation, participants posted reflective posts in a dedicated debriefing forum.

Quizzes: Each unit included a multiple‐choice quiz, with an additional quiz at the end of the course. These quizzes served both as assessment devices and learning tools. The system corrected the quizzes, and recorded the fact that a particular student had taken the quiz (a requirement for receiving a certificate of completion), but did not record those grades. Where students answered incorrectly, it linked them to specific course content featuring the correct answers. For the final quiz, a grade was recorded.

This course, like most MOOCs, was offered without institutional credit toward a degree. Students who completed a set of requirements within the course, however, were eligible for a certificate of completion. To qualify, they needed to participate in each week's main discussion forum (participation in the other forums was optional and not required for certification), take all weekly quizzes, pass the final quiz with a 10/15 grade, and conduct and debrief the negotiation simulation. These requirements required about three to four hours of effort per week; the final week required additional time for conducting the simulation.

Developing and implementing NegMOOC was a significant undertaking, and I was fortunate to have assistance throughout the process. Two experts from Creighton's Center for Academic Innovation (CAI), a videographer and an instructional designer, worked with me intensively to shoot and edit the videos and to construct the course's layout on the Canvas platform. The instructional designer also led aspects of technical support throughout the course.

Because more than two thousand students enrolled, I recruited six teaching associates for the purposes of giving students as much personal attention, and personalized substantive feedback, as possible. All were graduates of the Werner Institute's master's degree program in negotiation and conflict resolution. Their significant negotiation and conflict education and experience, as well as their experience with online learning and familiarity with the Canvas platform, made them excellent candidates for assisting me in teaching the course.¹⁶

One intriguing element of MOOCs is the elusive nature of their student bodies. To enroll in a MOOC, all one needs is an e‐mail address. Students may use their real identity or a pseudonym and provide no other identifying features. Even the most outgoing MOOC teacher knows a lot about some students, a little about others, and nothing at all about most—NegMOOC was no different.

But I did have access to some information about students from their self‐introductions in the Student Lounge, their responses to the entry survey, a Google Map that they pinned themselves on, and YouTube analytics (providing some information on viewers of the course's video). What I know about NegMOOC's participants is reported in Table Two.¹⁷

Finally, as I alluded earlier in the article, asking students “How will this course help you meet your personal or professional goals?” on NegMOOC's entry survey uncovered the diversity of their motivations. Some answered “I'm not sure,” but others reported a desire to become skilled negotiators on the job, to prepare for specific upcoming negotiations, or to improve their negotiation ability in personal settings. Some students viewed NegMOOC as a step on a specific career path — as a lawyer, a hostage negotiator, or a manager. Others wanted to test the waters of negotiation study before undertaking a degree program. Mediators sought to improve their negotiation skills while teachers sought to explore online learning or to experience a MOOC.

After months of preparation, NegMOOC went live. I posted a welcoming announcement and the first student introduced herself in the Student Lounge forum within the first hour. Within two hours, twenty students had introduced themselves and others had added themselves to the Google Map. Students began responding to other's introductions, and the course became interactive.

Five hours in, more than two hundred students had viewed the course welcome video. By the end of the first day, more than five hundred students had viewed the course welcome video, more than two hundred had viewed the first unit's substantive videos, and students had posted in all eighteen substantive discussion forums.

Most students mastered the learning platform quickly, while others were guided by the teaching team or by other students.

As I have noted, encouraging active student participation in discussion forums was a pedagogical goal. To achieve this, we broke the student body down into a number of smaller groups each week for their discussion forum interactions. In smaller groups, students would be less likely to be overwhelmed by the sheer mass of posts that can flood one heavily populated forum. Students can more easily track, and participate in, ongoing conversations. Additionally, they can get a better sense for other individuals who are studying with them. On the teaching side, working with smaller groups has pedagogical and administrative benefits as well. Working in small groups, teachers are able to better identify and raise themes for discussion, to relate personally to students, to be aware of group dynamics, and to respond to these intentionally. By assigning specific teaching associates to monitor each group, I was able to ensure more deliberate student monitoring and engagement.

Of course, “small” is a relative term. We made the decision to break the class down into nine sub‐groups with about two hundred and fifty participants in each, for the first week.¹⁸ We assigned each group one forum “room” for their Initial Reflection and another for discussing the Main Unit Content, focusing on personal negotiation orientation. In addition to the teaching associates facilitating the discussions in each forum; I participated in all groups’ discussion forums.¹⁹

The next week, we shuffled the students and redivided into six discussion groups, with a teaching associate assigned to each. This remixing ensured that students would interact with a variety of classmates and teaching associates, while still seeing some familiar names in their group. At the end of the week, I opened a new forum, open to all students in the course, to engage in a cross‐cultural discussion about that week's topic, bargaining and its dynamics. We contrasted bargaining culture in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and other African locales with a variety of bargaining cultures in the United States and Europe. Participants described bargaining situations ranging from haggling over the animals to be included in a bridal dowry, to yard sales, and described parties ranging from union negotiators to tourist‐trap street vendors. They compared stories of crossing from a bargaining culture into a non‐bargaining culture — and reflected on their coping in such foreign environments.

The third week focused on interest‐based and integrative negotiation, which elicited the same kind of discoveries and lively conversations it regularly does in traditional classrooms. Although the number of students engaged in the course had diminished by this point, student enthusiasm and engagement seemed to be on the rise. Behind the scenes, we paired up those students who chose to participate in the negotiation simulation, assigned them role material, and re‐matched students unable to contact their counterparts.

In the fourth week, we again reshuffled students into new discussion groups. In addition to learning the week's regular lesson, students conducted their negotiation simulation, posted self‐debrief posts in a dedicated discussion forum, and interacted with each other's debriefs. Toward the end of the week, many students shared their end‐of course reflections in a forum I created called “Wrapping up, Final Thoughts and Goodbyes.”

The outcomes for NegMOOC can be assessed in several different ways. In this section, I will discuss a variety of these.

Out of the 2,156 students who enrolled in the course, 125 students (5.8 percent of course registrants) received certifications of completion. As I noted earlier, course certification rates offer one limited measure that does not indicate the amount of learning that actually occurred. To gain a clearer picture of learning outcomes, I have also examined course completion, learning activity measurements, and the course's exit survey.

I estimate that 250 to 350 (11.5–16 percent) of the students completed the course. In this estimate I include the number of students deemed eligible for certification, as well as those other students who saw the course through to the end, based on student views of pages and videos for Unit Four. Some of these students may not have fully completed the certification requirements (e.g., they may have participated actively in all the learning and interactional aspects of the course without taking the required quizzes), or they may have fulfilled those requirements but chosen not to request certification. This number is an estimate because I lack clear guidelines for this category—monitoring each student's participation in every area in the course would have required a prohibitive amount of legwork—and would only have provided a still‐imprecise number.

Another way to assess the course's learning outcomes would be to look at the overall degree of interaction with the learning material. Two pertinent data points are the overall number of posts the class posted in the discussion forums and the number of minutes the class spent viewing the course's videos. We can tally the former using the learning management system and calculate the latter using YouTube's analytics software.²⁰

Table Three breaks forum posts down in several ways. First, it charts the weekly number of posts in the substantive weekly forums, showing that the numbers diminished as students stopped participating or changed their participation habits. It then adds on the posts in other substantive forums, most of which were created as the course went along to address specific issues (e.g., culture) or specific assignments (e.g., the simulation debriefing forum). In addition, it shows posting activity in non‐substantive forums, such as the Student Lounge or the technical assistance forum. The forum discussion data illustrates lively interactive learning activity.

The course video statistics, illustrating learning activity in which students independently engaged with class material, are similarly impressive. YouTube analytics indicate that the course's videos were viewed 17,332 times. Most of the course videos were five to twenty minutes long, with a few outliers in either direction. On average, viewers watched 75 to 85 percent of the clip. This compares favorably with typical patterns of engagement with videos demonstrated by MOOC students in general (Guo, Kim, and Rubin 2014), suggesting a high level of focus, motivation, and persistence amongst NegMOOC's students. Participants collectively viewed more than two thousand hours of video for the course.

We gained insight from the responses to the course's exit survey, which 157 participants completed. Survey respondents reported they were highly satisfied with the course, with 92 percent giving it a 4 or a 5 (on a 5‐point rating scale), and the remainder giving it a 3. About 89 percent of them agreed (or strongly agreed) that the course's learning material was beneficial to their learning, and 86 percent agreed (or strongly agreed) that the course's learning activities benefited their learning. Nearly all survey respondents also replied to open‐ended questions in which they identified a variety of material and activities they particularly liked, which suggests that providing a wide variety of material types and activities suited students’ wide range of learning styles.

Respondents also reported they were inclined to recommend a Canvas.NET course to a friend (on a 10‐point scale, 91 percent scored this in the positive zone, with 50 percent giving it a 10‐point rating), or to take another MOOC from Creighton University (on a 5‐point scale, 87 percent scored this in the positive zone, with 56 percent giving it a 5‐point rating).

Students also responded to an open‐ended question asking: “In what ways has this course helped you meet your personal or professional goals?” Several students reported that the course empowered them and built their confidence as negotiators.²¹ Others reported they believed they would be better able to plan their negotiation strategies. Students also reported that they gained appreciation for the emotional elements of negotiation, developed greater insight into their own personal orientations, and improved their interpersonal communication skills. What surprised me most about the NegMOOC feedback was how similar it was, in content and in style, to feedback I had received for other generally successful negotiation courses.

Students also offered significant valuable feedback directly, during and after NegMOOC. For example, two students reported during the first week of the course that they were having trouble posting in the discussion forums. The course's instructional designer immediately created video screencasts showing exactly what to do, and we sent these to all of the course's students to preempt any further confusion. After the course, one student sent me an e‐mail including an in‐depth comparison of his engagement levels with the different types of video material included in the course, concluding that videos of conversations between negotiation teachers were far more compelling than traditional lecture‐style videos and explaining why he thought this was so. His assessment will guide me as I prepare further material for future courses.

Creighton University also engaged in a review of the MOOC experience by means of a committee surveying the inception and development process, the budget, and all of the course data; the committee reported that the course provided a positive experience for its participants and enhanced the university's outreach and visibility. Canvas.NET also reported its own satisfaction with the course and has invited a second iteration. Finally, I gained many instructive insights from peers (negotiation professors, mediation and negotiation professionals, and alumni of Creighton's graduate program on negotiation and dispute resolution) who took the course or viewed parts of it.

Based on the feedback, I have developed a lengthy list of possible future improvements for the course.

Content: Colleagues have suggested adding such additional topics as game theory and the underlying mathematics of bargaining, as well as the effects of context on negotiation. Without extending the course, I will do this by adding materials to the “For further exploration” section of the course, or by adding on an “Advanced Topics” section to each unit.

Duration and Balance: The last unit of the course included a longer‐than‐average set of videos to view as well as the simulation. Several students, found this challenging, suggested extending the course by one more week. I agree with this, and in a future iteration I will spread the fourth unit's material over these two weeks and allow two weeks to conduct the simulation.²²

Student–Student Interaction: I will seek to increase student‐to‐student interaction, by (a) adding a live chat feature to the course that would allow students to converse with any classmate online at the same time, in real time; (b) promoting student‐to‐student interaction more heavily in the course's explanatory material; and (c) adding as an additional requirement for certification that the student must respond to at least one other student's post in each unit's main forum.

Synchronous Communication: In addition to the chat feature noted above, I will conduct one live webcast using videoconferencing software, in which I will engage with whichever students choose to participate.

I did not conduct NegMOOC because of a general interest in online teaching, but rather because of my curiosity about conducting such teaching at scale, with the kind of student body that MOOCs attract: random, self‐selecting, unfettered, and multi‐motivated. Can professors harness this educational vehicle for conflict and negotiation studies? As I noted above, four questions were with me, right from the outset:

1. Can we provide the same quality of negotiation education in a MOOC format that the field provides in its traditional and online (small‐scale) classes?

2. Can the signature pedagogy of the negotiation field, the experiential learning model, be implemented in a MOOC?

3. Can we provide students in a MOOC the same experience that has made negotiation courses successful and popular with traditional students — complete with high volumes of meaningful interpersonal interaction?

4. Assuming that the answers to the first three questions are generally positive, what implications might this have for negotiation and dispute resolution education? What strategies should the field consider? How do individual universities’ or programs’ goals fit into this?

With regard to quality, caution is called for. Although several indicators suggest that students experienced a subjectively valuable learning experience, this fact alone does not enable a direct comparison to the experience those same students might have had in a traditional academic course. But the question itself may not be the best way to think about the value of MOOCs, because, with a focus on comparison, it generates binary thinking and also suggests that one method could supplant the other, which was not my intent.

Students expressed satisfaction with the content and with their learning, but quality cannot always be measured by satisfaction. To the extent that this is, nonetheless, at least an oblique indicator of course quality, NegMOOC's exit survey did demonstrate, as noted above, high student satisfaction with the course, across a number of quantitative and qualitative measures.

I also take a cautious approach to deriving conclusions from the course's completion rate, which, at somewhere between 5.8 percent (those receiving certificates) and 16 percent (an estimate of those who actually completed the course), was in line with most other MOOCs. Completion may have some relationship to satisfaction, but what it tells us about quality is unclear. Conversely, although educational quality may indeed affect motivation to continue with a course, a great many other factors can affect a student's decision to complete or abandon a course he or she has signed up for.

A more pedagogically focused question relevant to quality is: did students actually achieve the course's learning objectives? Those objectives, as laid out in the course syllabus, were that by the by the end of the course, participants would:

• recognize the wide variety of situations in their professional and personal lives that can be improved through enhanced negotiation skills;

• reflect upon their personal orientation to negotiation, identifying how it serves them well and when there might be value in intentionally changing ingrained habits;

• distinguish between different strategies in negotiation, and apply this awareness by choosing strategies suitable to specific situations;

• study two models of negotiation: a cooperative model, and a more competitive model; and

• familiarize themselves with an array of preparation, communication, and persuasion tools for use in negotiation interactions.

These objectives were directly supported by the experiential learning model, as adapted for NegMOOC. (The course did not stretch to include behavior modification and skills improvement, which a traditional course often includes.)

The course was designed to ensure that students who completed it would achieve those objectives; it is retrospectively difficult to determine whether they did or not. Their work product in the course—including their comments in the discussion forums, their comments on open‐ended survey questions, and other communications—indicate that the course activities did help them achieve these ends.

Another possible measure is success on an exam or a successful final grade. The final quiz in NegMOOC covered all the required material in the course, focusing on both concept understanding and application. The exam was taken by 184 students who achieved an average grade of 87 percent, a strong indicator that students following the course plan throughout the course succeeded in achieving the stated learning objectives.

Can a MOOC provide the same quality of education that our regular, for‐credit negotiation courses do? Interestingly, the standards for assessing the quality of traditional negotiation courses have been somewhat vague both in terms of outcomes within the course (Ebner, Efron, and Kovach 2012) and with regard to the student's performance in subsequent negotiations. To the extent that we judge the quality of our courses to be high if they have a good plan in place, guide students through the steps of that plan, evoke tangible student learning, and receive positive student feedback, NegMOOC was, simply, no different than any other negotiation course. As noted above, however, there is no comprehensive measurement for comparison between this MOOC and a comparable academic course, so going any further than this and declaring, based on the NegMOOC experiment, that MOOCs can deliver anything a classroom setting can would be premature.

Comparing a MOOC to a for‐credit course designed to, for example, turn high‐level executives or graduate students into better professional negotiators, may be setting too high a bar in the first place. Use of MOOCs for academic credit or advanced professional training may not even be the goal. If we lower the bar, asking instead “Did the course give students a general introduction to the negotiation field?” or “Did the course spread the word about negotiation and conflict resolution topics and studies?” our basis for judging quality shifts, and comparisons between a negotiation MOOC and the conventional negotiation classroom become less meaningful.

Applying the experiential learning model to a MOOC required going beyond the traditional approach, which might be summarized as “learn, simulate, debrief, repeat.” We did this in NegMOOC by incorporating two major experiential elements: students’ past experiences and a negotiation simulation.

Students’ experiences provided substantial fodder for the discussion forums. For example, in the first week, a student described a salary negotiation she had conducted, connecting her goals to her choice of a competitive strategy. Another student weighed in, raising the issue of assertive pushback against lowballing. A third student offered a gender perspective, suggesting that gender would affect perceptions of pushback. I weighed in, connecting these three aspects of the negotiation, and relating this negotiation to one that was currently in the news. The story was brought up again the following week in at least two different forum groups by students who had participated in, or observed, this conversation. This happened often — sometimes with many more students weighing in, as well as several of the teaching staff. The original poster's actual experience thus became a vicarious or observational experience for others, and responders — teachers and students alike — helped the original poster, themselves, and other forum participants work their way through the learning cycle.

I believe this approach absolutely served its purpose. The stories’ role in the experiential learning cycle was obvious. The teaching associates and I helped students connect and contrast their experiences with the course material and identify upcoming situations in which to practice specific approaches; students often assisted each other in this process. I did not ask a direct exit survey question about this element of the course, so have no quantitative data regarding its effectiveness, although in their answers to general open‐ended questions, students certainly noted that this approach helped them learn.

Conducting a negotiation simulation in NegMOOC had clear benefits. As we expected, organizing and implementing the simulation was challenging and ultimately chaotic (no‐shows, last‐minute opt‐ins, monitoring, reorganizing, etc.). Nonetheless, only 18 percent of students reported that they found the pairing‐up and making contact phases difficult to manage. More importantly, 81 percent of respondents reported the simulation presented them with a worthwhile learning experience, with only 6 percent disagreeing with that statement.

Pedagogically effective negotiation simulations require good debriefing processes, and all the students who participated in the simulation also participated in a dedicated discussion forum. After describing the details of their simulation experience (medium used, outcome, etc.) in a “self‐debrief” post, they discussed some of the negotiation's dynamics, relating them directly to at least two of the topics discussed in the course. Finally, they identified and shared one take‐away lesson from the experience.

While some posted their debrief post and left (or remained to lurk silently), many students engaged with each other to discuss their experiences or develop themes. The entire teaching staff also participated in this forum. On the exit survey, 78 percent of respondents agreed that the simulation debriefing forum provided them with a learning environment conducive to gaining insight from the simulation experience.

Can a MOOC offer students an experience that mirrors a traditional negotiation course, in terms of the high levels of interactivity that have always characterized our classrooms? I believe it can; the question of how to do this optimally requires more study. For purposes of this discussion, I differentiate here between student–student interaction and teacher–student interaction.

The exit survey data show that many, but not all, students did engage with each other, with just over half (53 percent) agreeing or strongly agreeing that they “had sufficient meaningful interactions with other students in the discussion forums,” while 13 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed. Roughly half (47 percent) agreed or strongly agreed that they “enjoyed engaging with other students in the discussion forums,” and, again, 13 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed. Finally, roughly one‐third (36 percent) agreed or strongly agreed that “I'm left with the sense of knowing at least one other student in the course,” a statement that 25 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with.

Responding to an open question on the topic, many students wrote that they saw these interactions as a huge benefit of the course. A few wrote that they had formed real friendships, but others expressed that they would have wanted more meaningful student interactions. In retrospect, I wish I had set student–student interaction as a higher priority, but I am pleased that these results suggest such interaction is indeed possible within the MOOC environment.

On the other hand, testing the limits of teacher–student interaction—one clear area where good negotiation teaching and MOOCs seem to be at odds—was one of my main priorities in the course from the beginning. I intentionally enhanced teacher–student interaction by:

• expanding the teaching team to include myself and six teaching associates;

• introducing myself informally in the Student Lounge and responding individually to each of several hundred students who introduced themselves there;

• creating multiple discussion groups of a manageable size, and assigning teaching associates to maintain teacher presence in each;

• participating in each discussion forum myself, nearly every day, in almost every group;

• making course announcements regularly; and

• inviting and initiating interaction with students in other ways (email, social media, etc.)

The exit survey data show great success in this area. Nearly every respondent—a whopping 96 percent—agreed (35 percent) or strongly agreed (61 percent) with the sentence “I had the sense the teacher and the teaching assistants were present and engaged with the course,” and 91 percent agreed (35 percent) or strongly agreed (56 percent) with the sentence “The teacher promoted engagement and interaction in the forums.” In addition, more than half the respondents agreed (41 percent) or strongly agreed (18 percent) with the sentence “I had sufficient meaningful interactions with a member/members of the teaching staff.” (Only 7 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with this sentence).²³

Students’ responses to a direct open‐ended question on this issue reinforce this data. Many expressed how happy they were with the level of interaction; and while some expressed a desire for more interaction, only one shared a sense of a lack of interaction. On the other extreme, one student wrote that the course experience involved such familiarity and interactivity that it was more reminiscent of the small, intimate, seminar classes she had taken in college than of a mass‐participation class.

Obviously, the size of a MOOC puts strains and limits on teacher–student interactivity. More than two thousand students registered for NegMOOC, but some MOOCs are even larger. Although I encourage designers of negotiation MOOCs to not abandon a design that places an emphasis on interactivity, I can offer no assurance that such an approach would be feasible with twenty thousand students in a class. But I believe that NegMOOC demonstrates that an interaction emphasis in both design and strategy, which includes teacher attention and staffing, can achieve a high level of educational interactivity at a surprisingly large scale. Expanding the teaching staff by partnering with other professors, engaging more teaching associates, or creating other internal roles are all ideas teachers could experiment with in future MOOCs.

What are the broader implications of NegMOOC for negotiation and conflict resolution education more generally? This is, to me, the most important question but also the hardest to answer.

Universities might support conflict resolution and negotiation MOOCs for the same reason they do any other MOOC: to draw attention, to engage alumni, and to increase enrollment. But a MOOC on negotiation offers particular opportunities — universities could also use them to enhance their own internal conflict capacity, or to capitalize on the positive publicity and recognition that offering a MOOC on a negotiation, conflict resolution, or peacemaking topic in particular might have beyond that associated with other topics. And dispute resolution graduate programs could utilize MOOCs to introduce their program and its unique foci, perhaps designing them as feeder courses leading into their programs.

But MOOCs, I believe, could have an even more significant impact on the way negotiation is taught in traditional classes. Materials from MOOCs could, for example, be used for educational purposes in other frameworks. Teachers can assign students to watch a particular MOOC video—in essence, providing their course with a guest lecturer. Teachers can “flip” their classrooms, assigning students a MOOC unit to study at home and using class time to conduct simulations that incorporate concepts from that unit. Teachers could go so far as to incorporate an entire MOOC within the framework of a course that is “wrapped around” the MOOC. An entire MOOC's pre‐prepared content can be translated into other languages through subtitling videos and translating text—and then conducted by a teacher fluent in that language. The return for the effort that goes into preparing a MOOC can therefore be measured not only in terms of the students who enroll in that particular MOOC, but also by its contribution to the educational infrastructure of the field.

Finally, I suggest that MOOCs could help address one of the field's most fundamental and enduring challenges. I began this article by repeating the question that Chris Honeyman posed several years ago: “How can we teach everybody about this?” At the heart of that question lies the notion that negotiation and conflict resolution skills are not only suited for executives or lawyers; these skills should belong to everyone, and the world would be a better place if they did. This mission motivates many teachers in the field.

I suggest that MOOCs focusing on negotiation and conflict resolution offer a tool for advancing the mission of disseminating negotiation knowledge and skills to the broader public. Because they can reach so many more people with far fewer barriers to participation, MOOCs have unprecedented potential to create a significant educational shift that could help us reach the vast majority of the population who will never study in our traditional classrooms. This vehicle holds tremendous promise for helping us to rise to the challenge of disseminating knowledge about effective negotiation and peacemaking across the population in ways we have never been able to do before.