Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Business School, Disrupted - NYTimes.com

Business School, Disrupted - NYTimes.com
“Do it cheap and simple,” Professor Christensen says. “Get it out there.”
But Harvard Business School’s online education program is not cheap,
simple, or open. It could be said that the school opted for the Porter
theory. Called HBX, the program will make its debut on June 11 and has its own admissions office.
Instead of attacking the school’s traditional M.B.A. and executive
education programs — which produced revenue of $108 million and $146
million in 2013 — it aims to create an entirely new segment of business
education: the pre-M.B.A. “Instead of having two big product lines, we
may be on the verge of inventing a third,” said Prof. Jay W. Lorsch, who has taught at Harvard Business School since 1964.

Starting last month, HBX has been quietly admitting several hundred students,
mostly undergraduate sophomores, juniors and seniors, into a program
called Credential of Readiness, or CORe.
The program includes three online courses — accounting, analytics and
economics for managers — that are intended to give liberal arts students
fluency in what it calls “the language of business.” Students have nine
weeks to complete all three courses, and tuition is $1,500. Only those
with a high level of class participation will be invited to take a
three-hour final exam at a testing center.

“We don’t want tourists,” said Jana Kierstead, executive director of HBX, alluding to the high dropout rates among MOOCs.