“Marketing Management from Harvard, Financial Management from Stanford, Economic Principles from Duke, Strategic Management from Kelloggs. Received encouraging comments on coursework from pioneers in the field. Trained by business thinkers like Dan Ariely”
Admit it. Something akin to this will look mighty impressive on your CV. And what does it take to get these?
-decent broadband connectivity
– 6-8 weeks of hard work for each course
– tons of dedication and
– a passion to learn
The year of 2012 had been dubbed as the year of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) by the Times Magazine. With millions of people across the globe signing up for online virtual courses offered by the named universities of the world, this disruptive movement (of online learning) has been deemed as ‘opening of the Ivy league to the masses’.
Millions of young Indians are clamoring online to slap the Ivy League names on their CVs. And yes, looks like they are willing to put in the hard work (which they were reluctant to do in college, although they paid close to a million rupees for that MBA) that the intense course structure desires.
They straddle work, home, friends and the likes, and still manage to turn in assignments at 12:00 Midnight GMT. Their course peers around the world and an instructor sitting on the other side of the globe, then review these assignments.
When I graduated in 2011, I had never once thought that the concept of continuous learning’ in the form of a ‘virtual’ classroom would grow on my peers or me. Today, I find myself enrolling for courses offered by veteran professors and premier management institutes to augment my classroom learning.
In fact, re-doing some of the core MBA papers with peers from other countries, grading their assignments and getting their comments on mine was certainly a worthwhile experience (not to mention the ‘social media – flaunting’ of my Coursera Statement of Accomplishment).
The hundred pound gorilla of MOOCs is undoubtedly Coursera. With over 6.3 million Courserians (600 courses and 108 academic institutions in its kitty), there is little doubt that this business model captured the imagination and ‘some untapped potential’ which the traditional distance-education method did not. The other players in the MOOC space – Udemy and Edx are quickly bridging the gap
It can easily be seen that US and India constitute the top two of most of the management and technology courses in Coursera. What is worth noticing is that, in a country where one million engineers and 3,50,000 MBAs graduate in a year, there seem to exist some unmet need in the education space that MOOC movement has capitalized.
Looks like the MOOC movement is here to stay! So why wait?
Hello, Ivy league! Here we come!
This article is written by Anitha Kaveri. She is a marketing enthusiast, working in the Marketing Communications and PR domain. She is an alumna of Amrita School of Business.