http://fortune.com/2015/12/22/wharton-online-learning/
An early move into MOOCs made Wharton an international giant in online education.
When marketing professor
Peter Fader was asked to be one of three professors to build one of the
first online classes at Wharton in 2012, he was marched to the corner of
Second and South Streets in Philadelphia and told to face the lens of a
video camera instead of students for the first time in his life.
“They turned the camera on and said
‘Let’s do a MOOC,” he laughs. “I had no idea what I was doing. There
were no precedents. No one else was doing this.”
Looking to avoid a dull class filled with
101 marketing concepts, he cherry picked material from Wharton’s
elective courses in marketing. At the time,
Fader could not even imagine who would want to take the online course,
an Introduction to Marketing, one of the first MOOCs Wharton would
offer.
“My first impression was that the only
people who would want this were senior citizens, housewives, or somebody
in prison,” he quips.
Contrary to Faber’s initial expectations,
MOOC learners turned out to be an impressive bunch. More than 90% have
some college and most have a bachelor’s degree or higher. The age of
learners tends to range from 25 to 44, and the vast majority are
employed full time.
When Fader’s first course went live in
2013, he was amazed to get emails from engineers and managers all over
the world. “These people are every bit the caliber of our MBA students,”
he says. “I’d get an email from an engineer in Pakistan and lots of
other people who would never have had the chance to come to Wharton.”
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Three years later, more than 300,000
people have taken Wharton’s Intro to Marketing course, one of the top 10
business MOOCs on the Coursera platform this year. Nearly 100,000 more
have completed his second MOOC on Consumer Analytics. Fader also has
piloted an eight-week-long executive education MOOC offering called the
Strategic Value of Customer Relationships, which includes weekly “Pete
Casts,” essentially hour-long office hours for the 20 to 30 students who
have enrolled in the $3,700 course It will be offered for a fifth time
this spring.
Since 2012, some 2.7 million people have
enrolled in Wharton’s 18 MOOC courses. More importantly, the school has
awarded 54,000 verified certificates since 2012 and 32,000 verified
certificates in specialization courses since April of this year. What
started as something of an online experiment will bring an additional $5
million in revenue to Wharton in 2015.
Through it all, Wharton has firmly
established itself as the leading business purveyor of MOOCs. It was the
first business school to offer a MOOC, the first to offer a
specialization, or series of related courses, on Coursera, and can
boasts one of the highest MOOC enrollments of any business school in the
world.
No less crucial, the school is now
doubling down on its bet on MOOCs. Over the next 12 months, Wharton
plans to launch at least two dozen new online offerings, including its
first three SPOCs (small private online courses) on digital marketing,
gamification, and advanced product design. They will all be offered on
the EdX platform, the non-profit education startup founded by Harvard
and MIT, at significantly higher price points than the $95 certificates
for its single MOOC courses on Coursera.
Wharton also will bump up the number of
specializations from two to five through July of next year. The school
is hoping that its MOOC revenues will double next year, to at least $10
million.
The big bet is being placed by Wharton’s
new Dean, Geoffrey Garrett, who views the initiative as a way to further
extend the school’s brand around the world; reach users who would never
be able to get to the school’s Philadelphia campus; get faculty more
comfortable using technology to teach; and transform how faculty and
students engage in the classroom.
“Coming into the job, I had two
conjectures about it that have been borne out,” says Garrett, an
Australia-born political scientist who became dean in July of 2014.
“One, there is a real market for a taste of Wharton education for lots
of people who can’t be on campus,” he says. “And second, we now know how
to smartly integrate technology in the on-campus courses.”
More than 10% of our faculty have now had experience building and running online classes, he says. That
translates into more than 30 professors who have been involved in
Wharton’s MOOC efforts. Specializations involve multiple faculty working
together to create a set of courses, with each professor contributing
anywhere between one and three weeks worth of material. Wharton’s
business analytics specialization, for example, represents the combined
effort of 12 different faculty members.
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Garrett says that he has since discovered
that MOOCs can be used to identify talent that may ultimately come to
campus for the school’s MBA program, and that the content Wharton has
been developing can be a viable alternative to non-degree education,
long the province of the school’s on-campus executive education
programming.
“If it helps a person advance his or her
career, it’s a bottom-up credential,” he says. “Non-degree education
will increase pretty dramatically for those who find that the tuition
and opportunity costs of either a degree or traditional executive
education don’t make sense.”
While the early MOOCs were entirely free,
including a statement of completion, Wharton is fast moving into a
place where its portfolio of online offerings can become a substantial
source of revenue for the school. Wharton led all schools on Coursera
last April when it raised the cost for a verified certificate from$49 to
$95.
“There was six weeks of anxiety over that
decision,” says Anne Trumbore, director of Wharton’s online learning
initiative. “But since then we’ve had 32,000 people pay for verified
certificates. That is more than $3 million in gross revenue alone.”
The school’s specializations in business
fundamentals and business analytics, composed of four courses plus a
capstone project, cost $595 each.
Wharton also took its Global Strategy
course, originally distributed on Coursera, and moved it to the EdX
platform last month in a pilot at a cost of $149. “We got enrollment
numbers that were just as good as Coursera,” says Don Huesman, managing
director of Wharton’s innovation group, who believes the school can
further raise prices in the future. “After all,” he says, “a used
corporate finance textbook on Amazon goes for $200! We’re already making
money hand over fist. This is Wharton!”
This strategic focus has not only made
Wharton the business school leader in producing MOOCs and reaching a
massive audience with them. Wharton also has become one of the major
players in mastering the use of the technology to spread its knowledge
and brand across the world. Two-thirds of the learners who have taken
Wharton’s courses are outside North America, with heavy representation
from India, China, Russia, and Latin America.
“The stats on how many people already
have degrees and are outside the U.S. just hits us in the eyes,” says
Garrett. “We are reaching learners we never would have reached. The pure
marketing value of having millions of people sampling your education
cannot be undervalued.”
One thing’s for sure: Wharton’s
pioneering efforts have paid off in some important lessons. “Our efforts
were product-centric and our original MOOCs were six-to-12 weeks long,”
says Huesman. “We didn’t even think that a lot of people have busy
lives with demanding schedules. Today, we’re being more customer-centric
and asking what people need. They want the learning squished down into
four weeks.”
Besides the shorter cycles, Wharton
gained insight was what learners hoped to get out of a particular
course. “We honed in on the concept of literacy in a business topic,”
Huesman says. “If you are a general manager and don’t know a lot about
customer analytics, you might want to binge learn this so you can go to a
meeting and knowledgeably participate in the discussion.”
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Wharton believes its experience thus far
proves that students prefer so-called asynchronous online learning that
they can tap into at any time, no matter where they are in the world.
“The market doesn’t require synchronous learning,” says Huesman. “If you
re in Beijing and I’m in Philadelphia, there is no good time to get
together.”
Another crucial lesson was that MOOCs
were not about fame, despite the nearly instant celebrity status a MOOC
might provide a faculty member. “This stuff is not about teaching,”
insists Huesman. “It’s about learning. You don’t invest money to make
faculty think they are Oprah Winfrey in the 21st Century.”
Ironically, perhaps, the greatest as-yet
unrealized benefit of Wharton’s MOOC strategy may well be seen in old
bricks-and-mortar classrooms.
“What we’re doing is using technology to
get the low value, one way transmission of knowledge outside of the
classroom,” says Huesman. “It is dumb to have a faculty member stand up
in front of a class and deliver a lecture today. If we get that out of
the classroom, all kinds of interesting things can happen in class.”
Less time devoted to that kind of rote
teaching, Huesman says, would free up faculty to spend more time heading
dynamic discussions at Wharton’s San Francisco campus or leading teams
of students on experiential learning opportunities far afield from its
Philadelphia campus.
“It can free up faulty time so they can
craft learning experiences with students that are truly life changing,”
says Huesman. “MOOCs are raising the bar for face-to-face education.”
Garrett agrees. “Ultimately, we want to
use online content to provide a better experience for our students in
the classroom,” he says. “We want class to be more interactive, team
oriented and focused on problem solving. We tend to be in the
learning-by-studying moment, but I think we are going to have to balance
that with learning-by-doing.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story
incorrectly stated that Wharton’s Introduction to Marketing MOOC debuted
on Coursera in 2002. In fact, the course launched on Coursera in 2013.
