The Harvard Business School today (March 21) boldly made its first move into the digital education realm with a $1, 500 online program of three fundamental business courses for undergraduates and recent graduates of liberal arts programs. The school expects 500 to 1, 000 students to enroll in the beta version of the program which will launch this June to rising juniors and seniors and freshly minted college graduates who live in Massachusetts.
If all goes well, Harvard expects to make the CORe (Credential of Readiness) program available nationwide in the fall, with as many as 2, 000 students, and to roll it out internationally early next year. Students who enroll in the pre-MBA program will take a trio of online classes—Business Analytics, Economics for Managers, and Financial Accounting—all taught by full-time, tenured and endowed professors at Harvard Business School who have taught in the core MBA program.
CORe is the first of what will be a portfolio of online courses and programs from the Harvard Business School which has been quietly assembling an in-house online learning group dubbed HBX that now numbers 32 full-time staffers. In choosing to enter the digital education space with a paid offering, HBS has decided to pass on the MOOC bandwagon in which rival schools are providing both core and elective courses to hundreds of thousands of users for free (see HBX: How Disruptive To Management Education?)
Launching in late spring of 2014 is a portfolio of classes by the school’s big guns: strategy guru Michael Porter, Mr. Disruption himself, Clay Christensen, and HBS’ top professors in entrepreneurship, Bill Sahlman and Joe Lassiter. They will respectively teach the microeconomics of competitiveness, disruptive innovation, growth, and strategy, and entrepreneurship and innovation. Christensen’s course will require four to five hours per week over four weeks, while the entrepreneurship course will initially be limited to Harvard undergrads, graduate students, and postdoctoral/clinical fellows. HBS won’t give any of this away for free, though it has yet to determine how it will price these classes.
MOOCS? NOT FOR THE HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL
In the past couple of years, many business schools have been experimenting with Massive Open Online Courses, justifying their investments as a learning opportunity in search of a business model. In January of last year, the University of Virginia launched its first MOOC on growing an entrepreneurial business. In September, Wharton became the first business school to bundle a collection of MOOCs together to deliver much of its core required classes in the MBA program. Stanford’s Graduate School of Business weighed in last October with a MOOC on the finance of retirement and pensions.
