According to Fortune …
UVA’s Darden School has joined up with Coursera and plans to launch its first B-school class in January.
In a typical year, Professor Ed Hess figures he teaches no more than 300 students in his courses on managing smaller enterprises and the challenges of business growth.
When Hess walks into the classroom this January to teach Smart Growth for Private Businesses, however, as many as 50,000 people are expected to have signed up for it — more students than Darden has graduated since its founding nearly 60 years ago and in all probability the largest single audience ever assembled for a business course.
The professor will be the first to deliver a so-called MOOC (a massively open online course) for Darden to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection.
The free online class is part of a partnership with Coursera, an online education startup.
Since it began six months ago, Coursera has enrolled 1.57 million students in a wide range of courses taught by professors from Princeton, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and other prominent schools.
Very few of those courses, however, have been in business.
Mostly, students have gravitated to classes in computer science, math and engineering.
For Prof. Hess, it means learning an entirely new way to teach.
Like other MOOC courses, his course will be broken into manageable chunks, with short video modules, PowerPoint slides, and interactive quizzes.
An online forum will allow students to ask questions, get answers, and collaborate in learning teams by industry sector, work backgrounds, or geography. “This is like going to Mars,” he laughs.
Hess also plans two live webinars in addition to the five class sessions, one to give students real time access to him and another with an entrepreneur to help students create a growth plan.
Students who complete the course with passing grades will receive a certificate of completion.
Tags: UVA - Darden
The Homa Files 
Leave a comment