These days you can find MOOCs on everything from Quantum Physics to Music Production and many other topics in between. But MOOCs don’t cover everything – at least not yet. Beyond the intro courses and the one-offs (Intro to Knitting Socks?), the options grow a bit more thin. Though I haven’t yet exhausted the available business courses – far from it – I anticipate a challenge when it comes to covering the more advanced topics that are part of a traditional MBA, as well as getting into greater depth on certain niche topics of particular interest for me.
One approach I have considered is to forget about the advanced stuff and just focus on the fundamentals. Honestly, how much do you remember from a degree program a few years out of school? If you have the basics and the overall approach down, most of the specifics of any given job you learn by actually doing that job. But while I do still plan to drill the fundamentals – perhaps more so than one would in a regular MBA – I have come up with some strategies that I think will allow me to go beyond first year coursework, even if I don’t find MOOCs to cover everything I want to learn.
- Web-based professional training
The web is full of training courses and materials geared toward a professional audience. Many come with a fee, but free resources are available as well. This strategy is especially helpful if you are looking to learn more about a specific niche field or technique. For example, I have recently become very interested in agricultural derivatives markets. Try as I might, I couldn’t find any MOOCs that covered the topic in depth (though Robert Shiller’s Financial Markets had a short unit on these markets). I did, however, come across a course from the World Bank designed for coffee traders, a self-study guide on hedging using futures and options from the CME Group (which runs the world’s largest derivatives exchange), and a series of video lectures from another trading platform – all meant for people who want to learn how to use derivatives for hedging commodity price risk. Score!
I’ve also found value in a series of webinars and other resources from the website AgriFin.org, which is meant to help practitioners working in access to finance, specifically in agriculture, to share knowledge.
These examples are specific to my interests in rural and agricultural development, but I expect similar resources exist for other fields.
- Re-creating the case study
One of the things I feel I’m missing as compared to a brick and mortar MBA is the case study approach. In many programs, students are asked to work on real world, out-of-the-classroom examples, sometimes working with real businesses that actually need their help. My plan is to find two to three real-world business projects in which to use my new skills over the course of my studies.
As a first step, I have signed up as the treasurer of the board for the American Employees Association at the US Embassy in Kigali, a job no one else was very keen to take on. To most people, keeping the books and generating financial statements for the organization that manages the embassy commissary probably just sounded like an additional headache, but to me, it sounded like a fantastic way to use exactly the skills I learned in Intro to Accounting.
- Community college and extension courses
Both community colleges and state universities, and sometimes even private universities, offer courses to the general public at minimal cost. If I were still in the US, I could have taken the University of Missouri’s course on trading agricultural derivitives, rather than using online resources. Many colleges, as well as chambers of commerce, offer community classes on topics like accounting, running a small business, budgeting, personal finance, and other similar subjects. One thing I like about such courses is that they are highly practical and skill-based.
- Read a book
If all else fails, I can always find books on the advanced topics that interest me. My hope is to find more interactive ways of learning throughout this course of study, but hey – whatever it takes.
