INSEAD Expands its Digital Campus: MBA News

The INSEAD Customised Online Solution aims, in particular, to widen the reach of its faculty members – who will provide video lectures around which an organization’s customized program will be based, alongside quizzes and discussion forums – all of which will be accessible online.

“Currently, top-tier business schools are able to address at most 5% of corporate training needs, despite the fact that our faculty has critical expertise that would help employees and organizations stay relevant in fast changing markets. Online allows us to greatly increase access,” explained Peter Zemsky, a strategy professor and deputy dean at INSEAD.

The new executive education offering revolves around the concept of providing lifelong learning opportunities for executives attached to corporations which, in turn, have specific development projects in mind.

The school has already been working with Microsoft and Accenture and says that participating employees accessing the customized programs have yielded completion rates of over 80% - a far cry from MOOC completion rates, which often fall below 10%.

In the same way in which MOOCs have been regarded as a disruptive innovation for the education world, INSEAD also has high ambitions for its new online mode of delivering customized executive education, stating that ‘the new offering promises to disrupt traditional corporate training for middle managers and knowledge workers’.

However, whether or not the MOOC’s rising popularity in the world of business education is a specific target, INSEAD is quick to emphasize that the new form of online learning is intended to complement, rather than replace, its existing in-person executive education programs.

Indeed, the school’s new leadership development center in Singapore, which opened last month, has been designed to allow its in-person executive education programs to expand, notably its Advanced Management Program (AMP), as well INSEAD’s global EMBA degree.