Beyond The MBA: How Online Learning Is Forging A New Reality For Business Education – Forbes
Written by Jennifer Brunton.
We live in an era when old ways of doing things and legacy economic models are breaking down, and few sectors are as ripe for change as higher education.
Take the traditional Master of Business Administration program: slow, expensive and often stuck in the pastas a program created in the early 1900s can only be.
Yet prospects for a better model of business education are bright. In this age of tech-driven innovation, entrepreneurship is offering a faster, cheaper, more effective and more up-to-date way of teaching people what they need to know about doing business now.
The MBA as we know it doesnt really prepare students for todays world. Heres why.
First, while core MBA principles like data analysis, adherence to rules, maximizing value and promoting efficiency remain important, now other things are as well: identifying and creating opportunities for innovation, continuously pivoting in a fluid market and assuming substantial risks to achieve massive scale. And if MBA programs have integrated topics like artificial intelligence and big data, they havent fully embraced the needs of our moment.
Second, necessitating two or more years to earn a degree, theyre still operating at a mid-20th-century pace.
Which is perhaps why some of the most renownedand iconoclasticbusinesspeople of our day arent MBA grads. Think of the people responsible for some of the society-changing startups of our time, from hardware to software to social media and beyond. Groundbreaking companies grow under leaders who think outside the box.
Whats more, MBAs have become prohibitively expensive, just like higher-ed costs in general. An MBA can cost upward of $150,000, a fact that has helped fuel the student debt crisis: There is $1.6 trillion in student debt in the U.S. alone. Often a students employer will pick up the tab, but that fee is still value lostfunneled into the black hole of a university bureaucracy.
Its no wonder a recent Forbes article stated that applications to the majority of MBA programs are falling off.
Clearly, 21st-century studentsand companiesneed a more up-to-date business education model. One that trades stagnant 20th-century educational methods for a way of learning thats accessible and agile. One that values real-life skills over credentials.
These days, an ed tech that launched in Europe two years ago is providing that model, harnessing technology to challenge traditional business education. This innovative model has already proved to be a solution for tens of thousands of people.
In this model, the economics of the equation are reversed.
The target audience is no longer limited to a few customers able to pay a large sum of money, but rather anyone interested in growing professionally. What was an exclusive service before is now accessible to the mass market.
How is it possible to offer such an alternative at a fraction of the cost?
Here comes the second bit of innovation: The lessons are recorded and distributed using modern technology. This makes education scalable without sizable investment, as programs can be sold without incurring the primary costs of the old brick-and-mortar model: no classrooms, no buildings, no campuses and no recurring wages for lecturers.
Recording session with Uri Levine, serial entrepreneur, co-founder of a leading global navigation app and Instructor at ThePowerMBA.
And since recording can take place anywhere and at any time, this model makes it possible to incorporate global business leaders from various fields to teach the program, no matter where they happen to be.
Needless to say, this education model is lighter, faster and more efficient. Its also consistent with the disruption happening in other economic sectors. In entertainment, for example, where streaming is taking movie theaters and even traditional movie studios out of the equation. In mobility and hospitality, where the sharing economy is challenging taxi companies and hotel chains. In publishing, where social media is shuttering legacy periodicals.
Dependent solely on a smart device linked to an internet connection, this model sidesteps university gatekeepers and costs to give 21st-century students worldwide the business knowledge they need to thrive in a new millennium.
ThePowerMBA, the innovative ed tech in question, launched in Europe in 2017 and released its English-language Global program in June 2020. It puts to work the real-world experience of its collaborators, including some of todays top business and entrepreneurial minds. These savvy and charismatic figures can far outpace the academic theories and outdated case studies that define the traditional MBA curriculum.
Heres how it works in practice once you enrolla minutes-long process thats as seamless as purchasing a pair of sneakers in an e-commerce store.
The program comprises video lessons offering theory and powerful insights from world-class business leaders, via the case studies they offer. These 15-minute class sessions enhance retention, eliminate boredom and boost fun.
The course of study includes a well-structured curriculum in management, marketing, strategy, entrepreneurship, finance and accounting. But it also privileges topics crucial to doing business now. These include digital marketing, platform business models and varieties of disruptive tech, such as blockchain.
Because its unaccredited, ThePowerMBA skips the potentially years-long process of validating its syllabus, so it can frequently update its course based on global, market and other factors. Students are ensured a cutting-edge education that will allow them to hit the ground running.
In short, students get a flexible way to level up their business acumen, courtesy of the worlds first truly democratized executive education platform. And all at a tiny fraction of the cost of an MBA.
Enrollment in ThePowerMBA also comes with a giant perk: a diverse community of people of different ages, from different industries and from different places in the widest sense. ThePowerMBA is oriented toward the types of horizontal connections that contemporary experts contend will power future business and human growth alike.
Its network includes more than 35,000 studentsand is adding over 3,000 new ones each month. The program brings together its community at events in cities around the world, including Madrid, New York, Mexico City and London.
Besides increasing the demand for online education, COVID-19 has boosted the online participation of ThePowerMBA students, multiplying the number of online events the program presents. Several webinars per week draw thousands of viewers each.
In the meantime, its community is more vibrant than ever. Dozens of ThePowerMBA Ambassadors serve as references for fellow participants at the local level. Students seek each other out for help and advice: one looking for coding help for a new website; another requiring a digital marketing specialist; and so on.
The most creative responses to our changed world are stressing inclusion, interconnection and the horizontal distribution of benefits to everyone who needs them. A revolution is in process, affecting education no less than anything else. And by offering business ed thats efficient, affordable and fun, ThePowerMBA is spearheading it.
The result is that students all over the planet will have the knowledge to achieve new heights and drive positive change, whether that means jump-starting a new venture, transforming an existing project, injecting a leadership suite with fresh energy or whatever else the moment requires.
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Beyond The MBA: How Online Learning Is Forging A New Reality For Business Education - Forbes