In the summer of 2011, two professors made one of Stanford University’s most popular courses available online, for free. The course, ai-class.org, attracted more than 160,000 students.
Ten years later, most people contemplating an MBA will know about Massive Online Open Courses, or Moocs, as they and their providers are known. Stanford’s early classes have spawned businesses such as Udacity, which now boasts 14mn users, and Coursera, which was valued at $4.3bn at its IPO last year.
These purely digital providers enable students to choose a cheaper online MBA instead of a costly campus degree — or take any number of more specialised short courses online. Business education, in short, has broken free from traditional business schools, a development given added impetus by the coronavirus pandemic, which normalised remote learning and working.