Dive Brief:
- A new report from the University of Pennsylvania says that massive open online courses aren’t replacing tuition-based courses from top business schools, but suggests MOOCs could become a recruiting tool for those schools.
- Because of the audiences that MOOCs attract — students outside the U.S., foreign-born Americans, and Americans from minority groups — the business schools could use the courses to bring in students from outside of their normal pipelines.
- Business schools need to figure out how to charge students who sign up for online courses but don’t plan to complete them, the report says.
Dive Insight:
Business schools need to keep in mind that most MOOC students don’t complete their course — only 5% of the Wharton MOOC students did — and move away from a business model of charging for certificates of completion, the Penn researchers said. That might mean a monthly subscription or a “freemium” model, where access is free but add-on features cost money. The University of Pennsylvania researchers analyzed data on more than 875,000 students enrolled in nine MOOCs offered by the university’s Wharton School. The data showed that 78% of individuals who registered for an online business course were from outside the U.S., compared to 12% for executive MBA programs in 2012. Nearly half of the international students in the Wharton MOOCs were from developing countries.