Small private online courses: The new paradigm in executive education

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic is disrupting all sectors across the world and is threatening to bring about significant change in education and how learning is disseminated. Left with little choice, students and working professionals are increasingly shifting their focus towards online courses where the faculty and the student are remotely located and virtually connected. However, incumbent inertia persists. It is a phenomenon whereby incumbents miscalculate the potential of a disruptor because of some flawed initial iterations of the product and also, fail to predict the future scenario of the disruptive product with consistent improvements.

In India, online education is often linked with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) popularised by platforms like Coursera and Udemy, among many others. However, the scope and potential of online education are much beyond what is perceived. For a major part of the last decade, MOOCs were leveraged as a way to democratize learning and open up education to the masses. The New York Times went on to declare 2012 as the "Year of the MOOC". Today, MOOC providers offer more than ten thousand courses from nearly a thousand universities. However, the number of courses added is slowing, as is the number of new learners.

What is more constructive but probably less popular is the SPOC, or Small Private Online Course which is delivered live for a set of students but online. The live lecture is often recorded for recall. In particular, online courses, a combination of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) as well as SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses), are revolutionizing higher education and the corporate education landscape where, for a large chunk of young minds, securing a degree or certification from a leading university is a dream which is inaccessible and unaffordable.

The Course Structure and Resources

In 2014, Forum Academy was launched by the World Economic Forum with a purpose to change executive education for the better. The focus was to provide a chance to the executives to learn from the top minds in their field at a location and time of their choice.

SPOCs open the doors for a large number of working professionals who cannot enroll in full-time business programs and would like to attend courses remotely. Unlike in-class education, a SPOC provides for blended learning. There is a major focus on developing a robust and integrated Learning Management System (LMS) which allows a student to attend and track classes, assignments, and examinations and attend classes online in small cohorts. The in-class lecture is attended by a set of students and also beamed to a remote audience on an online platform. This duality provides a program the flexibility and dexterity that rigid brick and mortar models fail to do and is a powerful model.

Faculty and Support Staff

Even the most successful and influential products and services have flaws and so do full-time MBA programs. The absence of a "real world" experience is seen as a major shortcoming in many programs that hampers the quality of teaching. Many education platforms are dependent on faculty without any work experience who are bereft of management experience but try to overcome this shortcoming by using case-studies. As we know, a case study is a theoretical model where data is very well packaged and delivered to a student for them to solve. However, in many areas of management, the industry is ever-evolving and this calls upon the vast knowledge of managerial practice that faculty are expected to have in management programs. The success of Edward Deming in Japan is a classic example, where the practice was vital in bringing about a paradigm shift in management thought and ethos. Hence professors of practice are imperative for Executive Education programs. Support staff in blended programs play a pivotal role in keeping the student focussed and goal-oriented. This makes it crucial for a critical mass of support staff to supervise every academic program, ensuring that program administration is sound.

The Learner

While taking an educational initiative, every potential student must explore answers to the following three questions:

1. What is the relevant standard of certification in my field?
2. What specific skills do I want to learn?
3. What is the best way to learn?

It is essential to know that a well-developed blended Executive MBA programs offer both synchronous and asynchronous learning, which is a combination of live lectures, MOOCs, SPOCs, case studies, and simulations. These well-formulated programs also provide the additional advantage of peer learning and competition which are extremely critical for student engagement and adaptive learning.

Technology

The use of technology is an important pillar for a blended program, particularly Executive Education. With the roll-out of 5G, the network congestion caused by video streaming is expected to be eliminated.

Summing It All Up

Hybrid programs are the future of education. Not only do they do away with the need to travel long distances to attend classes, but also save on time and reduces the carbon footprint. Additionally, it is essential to understand that digital education or e-learning is the only medium through which large masses of people can be reached out across geographies in the country. Online Courses, championed by Executive Education are the new paradigm in learning and management higher-education.

By Prof (C) A Naptagaraj Subbarao, Dean – Executive Education & Professor of Strategy, Dayananda Sagar University, Bengaluru