The Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania is offering its Foundation Series of four courses free online via the Coursera learning platform beginning in the fall of 2013.
This collection of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, covers much of the same material offered in Wharton’s first-year MBA courses.
“This is the first time that a business school has bundled a collection of MOOCs together in this fashion,” Don Huesman, managing director of the innovation group at Wharton, explained to Bloomberg Businessweek. “We’re taking our core required classes in the MBA program, with the same instructors, to provide those same core concepts.”
U.S. News & World Report ranks The Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania at No. 3 in its list of Best Business Schools 2014. Full-time tuition is $57,026 per year.
According to Huesman, nearly 700,000 students in 173 countries have enrolled in Wharton’s MOOCs, more than the combined enrollment in Wharton’s traditional MBA and undergraduate programs since the school’s 1881 founding.
Wharton MBA Foundation Series courses include:
An Introduction to Corporate Finance – The course provides an introduction to present value techniques, capital budgeting principles, asset valuation, the operation and efficiency of financial markets, the financial decisions of firms and derivatives.
An Introduction to Marketing – The course teaches marketing fundamentals by examining customer decision making. It focuses on branding strategies, customer centricity and new marketing entry.
An Introduction to Financial Accounting – The course teaches financial accounting fundamentals, including the skills necessary to read, understand and analyze financial statements and disclosures, and how the financial reporting process can be affected by accounting standards and managerial incentives.
An Introduction to Operations Management — The course teaches students how to analyze and improve business processes, including how to improve productivity, increase responsiveness, provide customers more choices, and deliver higher quality standards.
Each course runs between six to 10 weeks and includes prerecorded lectures, suggested reading and interactive features, including discussion boards where students can communicate with professors or an assistant.
Upon completion, students can receive, for a $49 fee, an electronic certificate verifying completion of course requirements.
Huesman told Businessweek that should students eventually enroll at Wharton, the school has no plans to accept the certificates for course credit, adding, “There’s a very different experience that happens in a two-year immersion in a community of scholars that culminates in a degree.”
