Jobguide PROFESSIONAL_d322

Know-how Interview Whywe offer our knowledge for free Vor Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts wurde Bildung vorwiegend im Frontal-Unterricht live vermittelt. Doch dann hat das Internet die Methoden, mit denen Business Schools und Universitäten ihre Studenten unterrichten, weltweit verändert. Die Entwicklung von Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) zumBeispiel hat das Wissen weltweit renommierter Bildungsanbieter für ein breites Publikum geöffnet, das sich solche Weiterbildung zuvor nicht leisten konnte. Business Schools haben großzügig ihr Wissen geteilt. Doch bedrohen die MOOCs das Geschäftsmodell imMBA- Markt? Die Wharton School aus den USA hat diese Frage untersucht. Barbara Barkhausen sprach darüber mit Christian Terwiesch, Professor of Operations and Information Management an der Wharton School der University of Pennsylvania. Das Interview fand in englischer Sprache statt. Wharton’s MOOCs have proven extremely successful. What has been on offer and what experienced the highest demand so far? Wharton has offered the „Wharton Foundation Series“ on the web portal Coursera. This is a bundle of four courses: accounting, opera- tions, finance, and marketing. Operations had the highest total de- mand, as it has already had four offerings. Accounting had the highest demand within a single offering. Together, the foundations series has reached over one million students. We also have a course on gamifica- tion and a course on design on Coursera. Howmany students finish your MOOC courses on average? A typical MOOC for us attracts between 50,000 and 100,000 stu- dents that enrol in one offering. Of these, only 5-7 per cent complete the course. This is a pattern that we see all over Coursera. Recall that enrolment is free, so you enrol to check out a course, since dropping is without cost. Are the MOOCs a direct competition or even a danger for the future of the traditional MBA course in your eyes? No, they are not. We do not feel threatened by the MOOC. The big- ger concern is the technology that is embedded in and that enables the MOOC. This technology, we call it the super-text, poses the much bigger threat. We argue in the report that the super-text can be deplo- yed in multiple ways. In particular, we outline three scenarios how the super text will impact our schools: (a) the increase in productivity will lead to more output, be it in the form of extra courses, better teaching to present students, or in the form of free MOOCs, (b) the increase in productivity will lead to a decline in faculty, as the overall output is limited by demand and (c) the super-text technology will lead to an unbundling of the services presently provided by the business schools. Can you compare a business school’s costs for a traditional MBA course with a MOOC course for us? It costs us about 50,000 to 60,000 dollar to teach a traditional MBA course to some 50 or so students. A MOOC costs us about 70,000 dollar to develop for over 100,000 students and thus over 5,000 com- pletions. The key differences are that MOOCs don‘t include the costs of research and MOOCs have huge scale economies. Couldn’t business schools useMOOCs more as amarketing tool to build up the school’s reputation as well as draw students into their full-time programmes? Yes, that is exactly our point. Right now, we build reputation via re- search. But research is very expensive. We find that we spend some 400,000 dollar per research paper published in a good journal. For that you can launch multiple MOOCs. So, yes, MOOCs are offering a great promise for brand building. Jobguide Fotos: Wharton School der University of Pennsylvania Über CHRISTIAN TERWIESCH Matching supply with demand Gérard Cachon, Christian Terwiesch Hardcover, 2012, 3. Auflage, $ 98 Professor Christian Terwiesch ist Professor für Operations und Informationsmanagement an der Wharton School der University of Pennsylvania. Er ist Deutscher, hat 1993 sein Diplom in Business Information Technology an der Universität Mannheim abgelegt und an der Insead Business School seinen Doktor gemacht. Seither lebt und lehrt er überwiegend in den USA. Er ist Co-Autor von „Matching supply with demand“, ein weit verbreitetes Standard-Werk imOperations Management. Terwiesch hat von kleinen Start-ups bis zu Fortune 500-Unter- nehmen dabei beraten, ihre Geschäftsprozesse zu optimieren. Über dAS Wharton MBA Programm Studenten: 860, 40 Prozent weiblich, 60 Prozent männlich Internationale Studenten: 31 Prozent Dauer des Vollzeit-MBA-Programms: 20 Monate Kosten des MBA-Programms: 97,542 US-Dollar Akkreditierung des MBA-Programms: AACSB Web: www.wharton.upenn.edu Jobguide