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Academics are down on MOOCs. Business schools aren’t

Academic leaders are increasingly skeptical [1] of MOOCs, so why are top business schools increasingly warming to the online learning model? An annual report on online education published this week may hold a clue, Bloomerg reports.

Babson Survey Research Group polled more than 2,800 colleges and universities for an annual study (pdf [2]) on online education and found that 39 percent disagreed with the statement that massively open online courses “are a sustainable method for offering courses.” That’s up from 26 percent who answered the same way in last year’s survey.

Meanwhile, Harvard Business School [3] is experimenting with MOOCs, and Wharton made its entire first-year MBA course load available for free on Coursera. Five other schools in Bloomberg Businessweek’s top 10 [4] full-time programs have taken the plunge, including the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business [5] and MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Enough MBA programs have made classes available through MOOCs that the website Poets & Quants published a course guide for the MOOC MBA [6]. It’s an appealing concept: The website followed up with a prospective MBA who plans to piece together a business school education from Harvard, Wharton, Yale, and other top schools for less than $1,000 [7].

Read more [8]