ESSEC Business School and Coursera offer certified courses to Global BBA students

As part of the evolution of the Global BBA for the 2017/18 academic year, ESSEC Business School has signed a unique partnership with the online platform Coursera to offer its students a complete, multidisciplinary catalog of 70 MOOCs to follow over the course of the program. The students will thus be able to obtain credits by validating a different MOOC each semester for the first two years of the program. They will have the opportunity to follow courses that are not offered at ESSEC such as history, biology, psychology or engineering.

In order to enable students to better meet the challenges of an ever-changing world, ESSEC’s Global BBA evolved in September 2017.  The introduction of compulsory online courses, thanks to ESSEC’s partnership with the online, academic platform Coursera, will enable students to learn autonomously and will open them up to fields other than business and management. In order to validate credits, students will have to follow one MOOC per semester for the first two years of the program.

“This new system will allow students to be more autonomous in their learning, it will open them up to different disciplinary fields and it will more effectively integrate digital technology into the curriculum. We deemed it essential to acclimatize our students to this way of learning – something that will be indispensable throughout their academic and professional lives – as soon as they arrived. It is also important to allow students to explore new disciplinary fields that interest them, broaden their perspectives and strengthen their general culture.  Our partnership with Coursera is part of the redesigned Global BBA program which aims to facilitate the transition from high school to university," explains Hugues Levecq, Director of the Global BBA program.

Students will be able to choose the MOOCs they wish to follow from a catalog of more than 70 MOOCs from all over the world which have been created by leading international institutions such as Stanford University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. They will be able to take courses on art, history, philosophy, music, political science, engineering or even design, and consequently learn more about disciplines besides management that they find interesting while also expanding their general knowledge.

"ESSEC is taking an innovative step forward by introducing open online courses into its curriculum for on-campus students," said Nikhil Sinha, Coursera's Chief Business Officer. "Today, online learning is a really effective way to learn all kinds of subjects, not just computer science. We've built an education technology platform that goes far beyond just online videos to provide a rich learning experience including peer-reviewed assignments, in-video quizzes, engaging discussion forums, and more. We expect many universities to follow in ESSEC's footsteps in the years to come."

In order to validate their credits, students must obtain the Coursera certification and write a paper presenting the connections that they can establish between what they have learned from the MOOC and what they learn from the managerial courses in the Global BBA program.

Examples of MOOCs offered to Global BBA students in the partnership with Coursera:

-          Introduction to Genetics and Evolution - Duke University

-          Networks: Friends, Money, and Bytes - Princeton University

-          The Age of Sustainable Development - Columbia University

-          Moral Foundations of Politics - Yale University

-          Becoming a Sports Agent - Case Western Reserve University

-          Image and Video Processing: From Mars to Hollywood with a Stop at the Hospital - Duke University

-          Introduction to Music Production – Berklee College of Music

-          Tibetan Buddhist Meditation and the Modern World: Lesser Vehicle - University of Virginia

-          Astronomy: Exploring Time and Space - University of Arizona

Read the press release