MOOCs, flipped classrooms, virtual teams, course loads of textbooks loaded onto an iPad the size of a slim volume of poetry…that technology is increasingly shaping the world of business education hardly needs to be said at this stage. This does not mean, however, that we can downplay the significance and impact of what technology is making possible. The effect in the traditional classroom alone is phenomenal, but it is possible that the greatest legacy of this age of scintillating technological progress will be in terms of access to education.
Though, as perhaps was to be expected, completion rates are not as high as they might be, the uptake to MOOCs has been staggering. Plus, QS research has found that employers are increasingly ascribing credence to them. As part of the annual global survey of employers that forms the basis for much of our research output, we asked employers if they felt MOOCs were a valid form of professional development, if they encouraged their staff to pursue them, and – most importantly – if they viewed them as a positive when screening résumés – all of which the respondent pool agreed with. The most positive response (they answer on a scale), however, came in response to whether they believed that MOOCs would be important to their organizations in three years’ time.
It appears clear, then, that employers value forms of education that sit outside the traditional degree program system. However, the self-directed, solitary and bite-size format of the MOOC is not for everyone. Although, the same can be said for the MBA, which due to its elite nature, high cost and duration, simply cannot be an option for the vast majority of the world’s managers.
Neither MBA nor MOOCs: A third way
The challenge of access to high-quality business education was the one that Harvard Business School (HBS) alumnus, Ashwin Damera, set out to address. After graduating from HBS, Damera and an INSEAD alumnus started an executive education company which sought to bring Western-style professional education to India and the wider Asia-Pacific region as well as the Middle East.
“A lot of the programming we did was face-to-face; it was difficult to scale that. Every time we spoke to professionals in these markets, they wanted accessibility. It’s not always possible to fly to London or New York. Companies would also say, ‘We like what you’re doing, but instead of training four or five people in my company, how do I train 500?’ They wanted content and curriculum geared towards that.”
For Damera, it was clear that the answer to the problem of scalability lay online. And thus, the seeds for the Emeritus Institute of Management were sown. To be able to offer world-class, “Ivy League-standard”, in Damera’s words, business education at a brand new, low-cost institution, however, is something of a tall order. What Damera needed was some established expertise from some big names in the world of business education.
His vision, it seems though, is one in which some very big names are more than happy to share. Emeritus was duly founded in collaboration with MIT Sloan, Columbia Business School and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. But, how exactly did he convince these institutions to get involved in a project that could potentially serve to dilute their brands, and in time, even act as a competitor?
This, counters Damera, is not the way these founding institutions of Emeritus, as he terms them, look at things. “MIT Sloan has a class of about 500; Columbia is a little bigger, Tuck smaller. If you take the top 15-20 (MBA-level) programs in combination, they have 15-20,000 students in total. All these courses want to develop leaders who have impact. They realize, in the age we live in, that we might need to take the school to the leaders. These schools are not really interested in MOOCs; if you want to create leaders with impact, reading and watching videos will not be enough. You don’t become a better negotiator from watching videos, you need action learning. This is core to our approach. We use technology, but that’s only one third. Two thirds of it is learning by doing and peer-to-peer learning. The fact that we have feet on the ground in India, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East – around 75% of our uptake will be from outside of the US – is very appealing to them too. It’s a combination of these factors,” he concludes, “that attracts these institutions.”
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