INSEAD Expands its Digital Campus: MBA News | TopMBA.com

INSEAD Expands its Digital Campus: MBA News

By Tim Dhoul

Updated February 10, 2015 Updated February 10, 2015

INSEAD’s executive education arm has announced the launch a new offering where programs will be tailor-made to company needs, then delivered online at an employee’s convenience via web or even mobile devices. The launch comes with recognition of the importance the school is attaching to online education.

“I am often asked where INSEAD’s next campus will be located. I am increasingly convinced that our next campus is digital,” INSEAD’s dean, Ilian Mihov, said in a press release.

Customized executive education heads online

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.

Do strong completion rates reaffirm INSEAD’s approach?  

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.

This article was originally published in February 2015 .

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