Emerging Trends in MOOC Delivery of Business Education

 "There is a sea change in both the quantity and types of institutions offering MOOCs in the business education space", says Colin Nelson in this post on the AACSB Data and Research blog. Highlights include:

• The majority of MOOCs are still run by universities or other tertiary-level educational institutions, but a growing number of business-related MOOCs are being offered by institutions for whom academics are a less central focus. Evidence for this trend exists even at the most established MOOC platforms. For example, some of the business-related MOOCs available on the edX platform are delivered by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), while Coursera hosts a MOOC delivered by economists from the World Bank Group.
• More and more of the business-related MOOCs are being taught by faculty from outside the business school, or by professionals such as accountants or economists, either in tandem with business school faculty or on their own.
• Colin Nelson also points to the increasing appearance of MOOC series that can be pursued for relatively low-cost credentialing options. EdX, for example, offers XSeries Certificates for completing a series of three to five related MOOCs, such as the Supply Chain Management XSeries of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Coursera likewise offers Specialization Certificates for completing short sequences of four to nine related MOOCs, usually including a capstone project, such as the Business Foundations Specialization of the Wharton School. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is now taking this evolution one step further, announcing the iMBA program, which will allow students to compile multiple Coursera Specialization Certificates into a full MBA degree, presumably at a fraction of the typical cost.
• Newer platforms have begun to expand various free or low-cost MOOC offerings available in the management education space, such as Silicon Valley’s NovoEd, India-based EduKart, France Université Numérique (FUN), and Chinese-language platforms ewant and xuetangX.
• Some business schools are experimenting with independent offerings as well. Stanford Graduate School of Business offers many individual business MOOCs and full certificate programs, other than the ones it runs through Coursera and NovoEd, on iTunesU and on its own proprietary platform (Stanford OpenEdX). Harvard Business School also runs its HBX program independently of the edX platform that Harvard University co-founded with MIT.

For the detailed charts and links to all examples mentioned, please do check Colin Nelson’s blog post.

You may also be interested in Survival of the fittest: The new world order in education: Article from the latest EFMD Global Focus magazine. The education market has never been more buoyant. But that also means more change and new challenges to traditional business schools. If they do not respond, says Richard Taylor, they may face extinction.