by Laurie Pickard | Oct 1, 2013 | Courses, Platforms, and Profs, MOOC MBA Design, Thoughts on Higher Ed and Life
Just a couple of weeks ago the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business announced it was putting free versions of its first year MBA courses on Coursera. I am taking two of these courses, and they are top notch – so good, in fact, that I think I may have missed a calling as an accountant (more on that in another post). I am of course thrilled that one of the top-ranked business schools in the US has decided to make its first year curriculum available free of charge, but why would Wharton give away this material, which is basically the same product it is selling to its regular students? Granted, Wharton isn’t granting any academic credit to people who complete these courses, but the material is the same as in the paid versions. This begs the question, isn’t Wharton undercutting its ability to attract paying students by giving away the same product it charges for? There are three reasons I can think of why the school might consider it a good idea to give away the milk from this particular cow.
- Wharton believes there is no overlap between potential paying students and students interested in taking courses for free.
- Wharton hopes to use these free courses to attract paying students.
- Wharton believes that value of its MBA lies in the degree granted by the institution, not in the skills and knowledge embodied therein. Wharton assumes that potential students will also see it this way.
In order for Wharton (and other schools) to post their courses online without risking losing their core business, they must believe in the third conclusion. Indeed, signaling is quite important when it comes to degrees of all types. If your resume says Harvard or MIT or Yale, or any of the set of big-name schools, that’s a strong signal that you a) were accepted by a prestigious school, and b) performed well enough in that environment to have graduated. Does a Statement of Accomplishment from Coursera have the same effect?
I tend to think not, so I was surprised when a decision by the instructors of my International Organizations Management course not to offer a Statement of Accomplishment option sparked a firestorm of comments on the course discussion forum. Nonetheless, when I tell people I am designing my own MBA program from free online courses, the most common question I get asked is, are you getting credit? No, I’m not. But I believe that the coursework is intrinsically valuable, with or without the piece of paper.
For me, this project’s success hinges on three things:
- The availability of enough high-quality free course material to equal what is offered in an MBA degree program. Thanks to Coursera, edX, and others, check.
- My ability to complete the courses and to absorb the information. So far, also a check.
- Future employers believing that I have acquired useful skills and knowledge through this endeavor.
The last criteria is as yet an unknown. Admittedly, my method of bringing legitimacy to my self-made MBA – blogging – is remarkably inefficient. I enjoy doing it, and I think it’s necessary if anyone at all is to take me seriously. Practically speaking, however, I can mention my project in a job interview, or even put a line or two on my resume, but an employer would need to dig a little in order to see that I really do have the skills that come with a traditional MBA. And even if he or she read my blog, they would still have to take my word for it to some extent. That takes a lot longer - and requires more trust - than reading the words “Wharton School of Business” on a CV.
Much of the discussion in the book College Unbound, one of several new books on the subject of how post-secondary education is changing, centers on how students who don’t do traditional degree programs can signal that they have acquired skills that employers desire by other methods. The information is out there, but it remains to be seen how online courses can go beyond personal edification and translate into increased job prospects. I’m optimistic about the possibilities, but we’ll all have to wait and see.
by Laurie Pickard | Sep 17, 2013 | Courses, Platforms, and Profs, Thoughts on Higher Ed and Life
First semester is in full swing. I’m taking three courses - Introduction to Corporate Finance, Introduction to Accounting, and a class called New Models of Business in Society. The latter two courses are offered through Coursera, and they operate just like regular university courses, sans the classroom. One nice thing about Coursera courses is that while you are held to a schedule, there are new courses starting all the time. My accounting class, for example, started this week and runs for the next ten weeks. New Models of Business in Society started three weeks ago and runs for five weeks.
Finance and accounting are “hard skills” classes involving numbers, spreadsheets, and generally accepted rules and principles. New Models in of Business Society is part of a unit on leadership that I am including in my first year curriculum. For the purposes of my MBA, I am approaching leadership as “ways of thinking about work in life and society.” New Models takes a macro view of how businesses are perceived to act, how they ought to act, and how they do act. The professor, R. Edward Freeman, a business ethicist, is leading us through the progression of thought on corporate citizenship, from corporate philanthropy a la Andrew Carnegie to the emerging view that corporations can work towards a better world as part of their core business.
For another piece of my leadership unit, I’m reading books on the role of work in our lives, specifically how to maximize personal productivity and fulfillment. One of the best books on this topic is Drive: The Surprising Truth About what Motivates Us by Daniel Pink. Pink argues that work is fulfilling when it addresses three fundamental needs: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This three part formulation really appeals to me, and I can clearly identify times in my own life when my work has fallen into this sweet spot, meeting all three criteria - and times when it hasn’t. I know that I work best when I am able to choose when and how to work, when I am doing tasks that are challenging enough to require my full attention, and when I can see that my work is contributing to a worthy goal.
When I was in the Peace Corps I worked with a youth group. One day, I asked the kids in the youth group what their favorite activities were. Most of the boys and girls said things like, “I like to play baseball,” or, “I like riding a bike.” But one boy surprised me by saying, “I like to work.”
“Really? That’s your favorite activity, work?” I asked him.
He nodded. Yes, he liked to work.
I thought it was weird for a kid to list work as his preferred activity, but I’ve thought about his answer in the years since that conversation. After reading Daniel Pink’s book, I realized that one of my favorite activities is also work - provided that the work meets those three criteria of autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Another great book on this topic - a new book - is Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success by G. Richard Shell, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Shell makes a similar argument about the importance of “meaningful work” to overall personal happiness. Finally, on the topic of work and life, I highly recommend Jason Fried’s TED Talk, “Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work,” in which he talks about the types of environments in which people do their best work - not usually the office during working hours.
Between Freeman’s course, the books, and assorted TED Talks, I’m getting both the global view and the personal view of what work and business could and should be like. To round out my leadership unit, I’m looking for resources that address the role of managers - both in encouraging the people they manage to do their best work and in pushing their companies to be the best citizens they can be. Your suggestions welcome.
by Laurie Pickard | Sep 5, 2013 | Courses, Platforms, and Profs
One of the courses I’m taking this semester is An Introduction to Corporate Finance, taught by Aswath Damodaran, of NYU’s Stern School of Management. Even the title of the course requires some decoding if you haven’t studied business before. What exactly does one study in a class on corporate finance?Let’s start with the word “corporate.” In this course we are looking at large, publicly-traded corporations, i.e. firms that are owned by shareholders. “Finance” refers to decision-making that involves money. Corporate finance, then, is financial decision-making for publicly-traded companies. A foundational principle of corporate finance is that the main purpose of the corporation is to maximize shareholder wealth (more on that in a moment).
The course walks through the decision-making process for corporations using the concept of hurdle rates. Basically, any time there is a financial decision to be made – acquisition of another company, selling off a part of the company, investing in a new business line, expanding an existing business line, etc. – it is necessary to demonstrate that the proposed action comes with a reward that outweighs the risk (the hurdle rate), thereby leading to greater wealth for shareholders.
I’m loving using this style of thinking, and I’m learning a lot of new terminology. For example, calculating a firm’s cost of equity involves using a coefficient called beta that measures how closely share price has historically mimicked the movement of the overall market.
However, I’m finding that in order to come up with numbers for anything involving a mechanism as complicated as the market requires a lot of simplification. Almost every number that is used to calculate a hurdle rate is at best a good estimate. The coefficient beta is calculated using the historical relationship between share prices and market fluctuations, but there is no guarantee that the relationship will be the same in the future.
Furthermore, even the guiding principle of increasing shareholder wealth is a drastic simplification. For another course, I’m reading a book called Conscious Capitalism. The author of that book, who is the founder of Whole Foods, says that much of the current public mistrust of capitalism stems from the idea that businesses are only out to make money, when in fact a good business should generate value not just for shareholders but also for its customers, its employees, its community, and society at large. But how do you measure that value? It is easy to calculate changes in share price, but how do you measure whether a community has benefited from the operations of a particular business? And even if you could determine that a business had had a positive effect, how would you calculate the size of that effect? A finance person would say that anything besides shareholder wealth is just noise; the only appropriate focus in corporate finance is maximizing shareholder wealth, nothing more and nothing less. But I’m not convinced.
Nonetheless, I highly recommend the course; Professor Damodaran is a great lecturer – engaging, funny and incredibly knowledgeable. His course provides an approachable introduction to a topic that is intimidating to many people without a business background. And the concepts introduced in the class and the method for working through calculating a hurdle rate are an important foundation. Although I’m not planning to become a CFO, I’ve found this class enormously helpful in understanding the finance mindset.
