Noida, May 09, 2014 –
Business has transformed and gravitated towards higher efficiencies but business education has gotten worse in quality and higher in expense.
There are major changes in business around us. Technology has transformed business, competition has made it more efficient and the pace of scale and change is unprecedented. There are major macro trends which require business education to re-invent itself. Some of these trends are:
- Technology driving much greater collaboration: From Internet to Social, people are doing business more and more with each other. It’s a flatter world and connectivity is real time. This has broken down boundaries and conventional rules.
- Information itself losing power: Dissemination of information has become cheap and efficient. Everyone has access to all kinds of information. Everyone is a strategist. There is no arbitrage in business information in particular.
- Business skills are more and more desirable but the education keeps on getting more and more expensive: Business schools globally have raised fees all through 2000’s, including recession and even though quality is harder to ascertain, it has fallen by most measures.
This is creating a situation where transformation is imminent.
Sunstone Business School pedagogy is based on 3 fundamental concepts – Low cost structure, focus on learning than teaching and connecting the world through intense collaboration.
We follow a structure and a pedagogy that recognizes the changing times and build on it. We are built around important concepts:
- Focus on learning than teaching: We don’t use faculty as lecturers to provide information to students, but use them as coaches to make them learn how to process it. We follow a problem-based pedagogy that encourages students to use available information to solve a given problem. This is more reflective of a real business environment where professionals face real problems around sustenance, growth and differentiation.
- Connecting the world through intense collaboration: We are not a traditional school, but a collaborative platform. The connected world has made available all of us to each other. We use this for social purposes but increasingly it is increasing avenues to learning from each other. We all have unique experiences and contexts to share and extrapolate from. We heavily inculcate this “social learning” as a part of our curriculum.
- Low cost structure: Our primary goal is making students learn and we don’t invest in anything that doesn’t increase student learning. We are committed to a non-real estate based structure to reduce cost heavily, and rely heavily on technology to keep the quality high.
Products offered by Sunstone
Sunstone Business School offers 2 products rights now – a 1 year-PGP for working professionals and Open Online Courses for everyone :
PGP : Sunstone offers a 1 year post graduation program to high quality working professionals in the technology space. The course helps them to widen their perspective and open doors for more business-centric careers. We have been running this program for over 2 years now. We currently have around 100 students in a batch and this is fast becoming the program of choice for technology – centric professionals. We are now offering it all across India.
Open Courses : Sunstone started India’s first MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) in management and currently offers free online courses targeted at committed professionals towards specific skill development. Some of our courses like “Negotiating for Growth”, and “Turning ideas for Action” are being taken by thousands of students every month and helping them professionally and personally.
Our Mission
“Our mission is to empower individuals to fuel business”
Businesses create value and employment. If a professional is working in a commercial environment in any role, they can do a better job if they know more about business – how it works, how it can grow and how it differentiates. We envision a future where an individual can acquire high quality business skills and use them to turbo-charge development and growth to ultimately create a better society for everyone.
Accomplishments
Since its inception in last 3 years, Sunstone has become the business program for choice for technology professionals.
· Over a 100 active students currently
· Over 10,000 students taught through open courses.
· Currently the program of choice for technology professionals – consistently being picked over top brand programs by students.
· Successful in creating a technology assisted experiential method of teaching
· The first Open Online Courseware in management in India
· Fantastic acceptance of students from the industry in wide areas ranging from technology to private equity.
Expansion Plan
Earlier, this year Sunstone opened the PGP program for working professional’s pan-India. We are now also beginning to get interest from international students.
Our goal is fundamentally alter the contours of business education by democratizing it – making it available to everyone. Some areas of expansion for us are:
– Geographical expansion: We expect to be a global school over time.
– Product Expansion: We expect to launch newer and more innovative products around business education.
– Target market expansion: We expect to launch other programs in other sectors over time.
We want to be the place of choice for working professionals across the globe to learn about business. CCI Newswire
