The Future of Executive Education - Page 3
MOOCs will never make up for the fact that elite institutions are charging massive amounts for accredited and recognized graduate level credentials, e.g. the $100,000 MBA. What we need is more institutions like NECB that provide accredited, high-quality, proven, graduate-level education at very affordable prices so that companies can invest in executive development without breaking the bank.
Executive education will evolve to include quite a bit of virtual and blended learning, but we must do it in a way that substantially engages the learner, and facilitates sharing discussions and expertise with peers and experts they can learn from.
Social business and social learning are facilitating tacit knowledge transfer for executives. How do you see explicit course based learning working alongside this?
LinkedIn, which is probably the most subscribed to social network for business people, has an explicit information sharing segment. This and other forms of social networking and List-Serves are ways to keep abreast of major developments in business and to keep one’s ear to the ground. However, these mechanisms are usually not enough, in and of themselves, to form a complete picture for an executive to use as a basis for leadership or decision making – much the same way that Wikipedia might be a good starting point for a research project, but you could never rely on the data you find there without cross-checking against validated sources. Explicit course-based learning is what provides the validation around subject matter and gives the executive more confidence in the information. So I would see social networking as a means to keep abreast of what one needs to learn, rather than a means to learn it.
For example, I recently came across a question on LinkedIn about whether quality is always going to be costly, and how to decide between quality and quantity in a service-ased industry. This question will get a lot of responses from LinkedIn members and some good starting points as to thought process. But, to really answer this question, one needs to delve deeper into the particularities of a specific industry, or look at case studies from a broad range of industries, and that is when you will want to take more explicit courses on the subject matter.
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