Speaker 1: Now you are attracted by certain qualities of a social MOOC and think it might be nice to make one on your own. Before you propose a MOOC solution to your service, you must think through a list of hard questions. And you must find a satisfactory answer to each of these questions before you proceed to the next step. The key is that your answers need to satisfy your key stakeholders, namely your clients, your senior management, your board, and your funders. It's not enough that you want this to happen. You must also persuade these people to participate and invest in your MOOC solution. This sounds like a tall order to fill, and one may feel overwhelmed thinking of the complexity of the stakeholder expectations. One good approach is to look at your organization's strategic direction for the next three to five years. Usually, consideration of stakeholder expectations is part of the process of determining the direction and strategic goals of an organization. Check the strategic goals one by one to see how many times your idea can hit the targets. For instance, if your organization sets out to enhance service accessibility by moving some services online, bingo, you score that point. If your organization wants to increase its visibility in the sector and become more known to clients and sector colleagues, then a MOOC project sounds like a great fit. You may note that as you check your project idea against each strategic goal, your answer to one question may induce more questions. The initial why and what questions will lead to many how, when, and who questions. To avoid going to small branches and being tangled in the details, I suggest you focus on what we may call trunk and big branch questions instead of the twig questions. Later in the planning stage, you could move on to small details, but not before a strategic decision has been made. Here are some of the sample trunk and big branch questions that are probably applicable to almost all service providers. What are the problems that face your clients or your colleagues for which you think the MOOC would provide a better solution? Is this a subject for which your organization's expertise is recognized? Why do you think people will come to take this MOOC? Is reaching hundreds and thousands of participants part of your service mandate? If not, why do you want to go massive? Who are your target participants? Are they your existing service recipients? If not, are these the ones your organization failed to reach by using other service approaches? Why do you want this service to be open to anyone? How would making it open to all affect your core service recipients? What type of social MOOC are you proposing? What particular outcomes would you like to achieve through this MOOC compared to the existing service delivery methods you already use, for example, face-to-face and webinar? How would using a MOOC add value for the clients? What are the special benefits to your organization of creating this MOOC? Once you get through all these questions and write down your well-thought-out answers, you will find if you group your answers in a certain way, you will already have a solid problem statement and project objectives often required for a funding proposal or a business plan. Once you have made sure your project is well aligned with the strategic goals, you can go on with the how, who, and when questions.