Dinner in Madrid with classmates

As fate would would have it, I would be I Spain when a post course dinner and get together is announced for Critical Perspectives on Management; the first foray into the wonderful world of Cousera for IE Business School, the Madrid based private higher education provider.

For an online class with thousands of students spread across the globe, the prospect of only eight people attending seems somewhat anti-climatic, it isn't, it makes the dinner more intimate. This has been tremendous advertising for IE Business School, I was interested to speak to filming director Phil who would also be attending, we will see from his perspective how the class ran and his views on the final product. I am extremely interested to see how this has translated into enquiries and ultimately enrolments into this prestigious business school. 

Not only does the IE Business School regularly rate highly with the international face-to-face fulltime MBA; the blended delivery executive MBA and global MBA requiring substancial online components and attendance in cities of Madrid, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Boston/New York and Providence. The Coursera class is an actual class run in their MBA program, we took the full Critical Perspectives on Management class in its entirely,  just as it would be done as a fulltime face-to-face student attending IE Business School. 

According to Rolf, if students do not understand or grasp a concept in his class, he tells them to go and review the Cousera video. Also interesting was the fact that the highest score was 78%, about 7200 took the final exam with about 5500 people passing. Rolf said that he has incorporated elements of the online class into the fulltime examination making the fulltime examination more difficult.

For my part, I only sought out the class for my close friend and partner; only joining her at the last moment to provide feedback and consultation building on the foundations of her mini-MBA she undertook a couple of years back. I quickly found this online offering to be very interesting, informative and challenging - I was hooked. Unfortunately, she was unable to be in Madrid at this time due to work commitments. 

Thanks to Mecky, I took the time to complete the unit, I was busy with my graded university course finding it difficult to find time to watch the online lectures, undertake the required readings, quizzes and final exam. Throughout, we were busy discussing the course content, principles, helping each other out and generally supporting our endeavors to learn the material. The course run by Rolf was so much more interesting than my change management class, more effort was put into that than actual university class.