Babson Announces Plans to License Online Entrepreneurship Courses
One of the world’s top-ranked business schools for entrepreneurship, Babson College has developed graduate-level courses that can be licensed to other schools seeking to capitalize on public interest in startups.
Online educational platform NovoEd recently announced that it is partnering with Babson, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the University of California, San Francisco, to offer online entrepreneurship courses. Accounting for Entrepreneurs and Crash Course in Creativity are just two of the thirteen available for registration, most of which have never been taught online before and will be free. Eventually Babson intends to expand the curriculum to add about 35 additional courses for schools to license and offer to their students, completing the expansion in the next two to three years. Current courses are online-only, but future courses will also include a face-to-face component with Babson-trained, locally based instructors.
According Shahid Ansari, chief executive of Babson Global, international schools are especially interested in online education. Chief executive of NovoEd Amin Saberi attests to this interest, noting that Babson’s 13 partners in the Global Consortium for Entrepreneurship Educators (including schools in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East) are all interested.
As for logistics, students interested in these courses will have to enroll at one of the schools licensing them, and if they are enrolled in a degree-granting program, the degree will come from that institution. A notable component of the coursework is its practical nature; students must launch a real business by graduation, sometimes in teams. Roughly 350,000 students have already taken entrepreneurship courses through NovoEd but the completion rate is typically low, though the social component tends to keep students interested. Since the launch of the platform, more than 7,000 businesses have been created by teams of students.
“It is affordable entrepreneurship education,” states Ansari, “for the vast number of people who will never be able to afford a Babson or Stanford education.”
