Dougcraig's List: Exec Ed Research

• However, a new international report, Executive Education Futures, found that just under 60% of purchasers believe spending will grow in the next 24 months.
• Although total spend is important, corporate purchasers are focusing on value, often seeking to do more for less. However, value is judged not just on financial measures, but also quality of teaching, fit with the provider and impact.
• Demand for executive education is greatest in the fields of strategy, general management and leadership
• Key to a successful programme was a connection between teaching and real business issues.

• There is always a risk of tutors not having enough direct business experience to help participants apply academic models to their daily business.
• those studying, cost is not the key to choice of provider, although one student said: Everything about the course was good just thought it was a little bit expensive i.e. felt like we were paying for the facility and not the programme.
• value for money is more important than the actual cost of the programme, less than 10% will choose the lowest cost study option. Among corporate interviewees choice of provider is more about the fit with a particular company, understanding the culture and personal relationships, than it is about cost
• The academics wanted to showcase their tools and models, rather than understand the business and speak their companys language.
• but the reputation of the business school/provider is very important. Twice as many individuals (50%) ranked Reputation of the business school/provider as Most Importan
• Other aspects rated as important in making choices include course content, value for money, quality of teaching, personal recommendation and FT rankings of the business school as a whole and specifically its executive education services.
• there can be a trade-off between having academic stars deliver a programme and the ease of dealing with particular providers.
• dont want to pay bespoke prices and then feel that they are being offered something off the shelf.
• Coaching can help embed knowledge, along with alumni programmes and tools such as Linkedin. Finding a way to sustain the impact and measure the growth of an individual and benefit to the business would be very valuable for many employers. Increasingly, one of the main requirements of purchasers is a greater focus on personalised learning plans.
• employers in the future will be to drive greater value for money from their spending on executive education.

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• When The Times wrote about this last month, 58,000 students had signed up for the course. After the article, enrollment leapt to 130,000, from across the globe.

   

  Thrun’s ultimate mission is a virtual university in which the best professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing, peer interaction and grading would happen online; a cadre of teaching assistants would provide some human supervision; and the price would be within reach of almost anyone. “Literally, we can probably get the same quality of education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 percent of the cost,” Thrun told me.
• The traditional university, in his view, serves a fortunate few, inefficiently, with a business model built on exclusivity. “I’m not at all against the on-campus experience,” he said. “I love it. It’s great. It has a lot of things which cannot be replaced by anything online. But it’s also insanely uneconomical.”

• Thrun believes there are technological answers to all of these questions, some of them
    being worked out already by other online frontiersmen.

   

  “If we can solve this,” he said, “I think it will disrupt all of higher education.”

   
• “In the same way that a lot of things go into the cost of a newspaper that have nothing to do with the quality of the reporting — the cost of newsprint and delivery — we should ask the same thing about universities,” Hennessy told me. “When is the infrastructure of the university particularly valuable — as it is, I believe, for an undergraduate residential experience — and when is it secondary to the learning process?”
• rder. There are disrupters, like Sebastian Thrun, or Napster, or the tweeting rebels in Tahrir Square. And there are adapters

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