Onawa Gardiner, Marketing Specialist
@onawanna

Regardless of personal or professional status, being able to use negotiation can positively impact your life experience and goals. The Successful Negotiation: Essential Strategies and Skills MOOC, developed by Professor George Siedel, focuses on providing learners around the world with the skills and techniques to successfully leverage the art of negotiation in order to optimize personal and business situations.

“This course on successful negotiation is really focused on the need of you and I as individuals, where we negotiate on a daily basis…it is also based on the needs of people in business who need to negotiate for more business success.”  – Professor Siedel

Since the launch of Successful Negotiation, Professor Siedel has had the opportunity to interact with a diverse range of learners, and to realize the impact of his MOOC on himself and students looking for ways to enrich their personal, education and business skillsets. He discussed with Academic Innovation (AI) his experience working on his MOOC that has reached over 360,000 lifelong global learners, and reflected on the impact it has had on his own teaching as well as on those who have taken his MOOC.

“One of the things I loved about that course [Successful Negotiation] was the feedback I received from learners. The thank you messages they send about how the course helped them individually… in their personal negotiations, their family negotiation or how the course helped them in terms of business.” – Professor Siedel

In addition to hearing from learners the direct impact the MOOC had on them, the amount of interaction available in an online format surprised Professor Siedel.

“There was a lot more interaction with the learners than what I anticipated. They visited my courses on campus, some of them are now considering the Michigan Ross Business School…” – Professor Siedel

From this experience, Professor Siedel has had the opportunity to observe the differences in on-campus teaching compared to instructing learners around the world via a MOOC.

“I’ve received messages from several CEOs who have told me how the course has saved them millions of dollars…I loved having that kind of direct impact with a MOOC that isn’t possible in a traditional course.” – Professor Siedel

To learn more about Professor Siedel’s work as an Academic Innovator, watch the Academic Innovators video.