Emerging Trends in MOOC Delivery of Business Education

By Colin Nelson

In past posts, I have touched on the subject of business school activity in the realm of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which over the short period of time I looked at them previously had begun to grow rapidly. Today, however, there is a sea change in both the quantity and types of institutions offering MOOCs in the business education space, in the types of instructors teaching them, and, especially, in the types of courses being offered.

As in my previous posts, I examined many of the available MOOC providers that offer courses in the management education space, including Coursera, edX, Udacity, Futurelearn, the Canvas Network, and the Academic Financial Trading Platform (AFTP). Most of these providers have either maintained or grown their offerings since last I looked in on this topic[1]:

Figure 1. Business MOOCs by Platform and AACSB Accreditation Status of Provider Institutions, as of 6/30/2015

Note: The numbers on the graph bars indicate the actual absolute numbers of business-related MOOCs offered by the given provider type.

 

Figure 2. Institutions Offering Business MOOCs by Platform and AACSB Accreditation Status, as of 6/30/2015

Note: The numbers on the graph bars indicate the actual absolute numbers of provider institutions of the given type.

As you can see, 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.

Additionally, more and more of the business-related MOOCs I looked at 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. Both of the MOOCs offered on edX by Harvard Business School are co-taught with faculty from other departments, while on Coursera, only three out of 15 business-related MOOCs of the University of California, Irvine, are taught by a faculty member from the Merage School (the remainder are taught by UCI-Extension faculty).

Table 1. Proportion of Non-Business School Instructors of Business-Related MOOCs, by Platform, as of 6/30/2015

MOOC Platform	Total Number of Instructors Involved in Business MOOCs	Percentage from Outside Business Schools
Coursera	171	18.7%
edX	138	64.5%
Futurelearn	21	14.3%
AFTP	6	0.0%

Perhaps the most important development, however, is the increasing appearance of MOOC series that can be pursued for relatively low-cost credentialing options (at least when compared to the cost of a degree). 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.

Finally, 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.

It seems clear that business education MOOCs are here to stay, but whether they will become a widely accepted part of higher educational credentialing remains to be seen.

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[1] Changes to the web format of the Canvas Network catalog of MOOCs since I last looked in on this topic have made it virtually impossible to determine who teaches the business-related courses offered via that platform or the total number of them; hence they are not considered further here. Udacity offers exactly one business-related MOOC in entrepreneurship, taught by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank (no academic affiliation).

Comments

[Catherine Mbinya]

Thanks for this.