Bangalore November 21,2013: Sunstone Business School), Sunstone Business School www.sunstone.in Open Courses is India’s first Open Courses (MOOC) in management. This is Sunstone’s effort toopen up the knowledge to a larger community and build a continuous and flexible learning environment.
Sunstone MOOC has enrolled more than 15,000 professionals this year including people from global locations. These professionals do 2-3 week faculty-led online courses in various management disciplines such as marketing, e-commerce, negotiations, leadership, entrepreneurship and finance. Sunstone has partnered with many international content providers e.g., Saylor.org to deliver these courses.
Sunstone has also launched free Industry Webinar series where senior industry experts discuss new ideas and themes to a larger audience through web. Topics include venture capital, digital marketing, analytics etc. Sunstone is expected to do 20 such discussions this year with ~2,000 people attending them.
For huge working professional population, the avenues for learning in India are limited and hence, Sunstone’s free MOOCs have been extremely popular. Indians are already registering in other international MOOCs such as Coursera, Udacity in huge numbers and Sunstone hopes that other premier business schools in India will also start faculty led open courses.
Making quality education accessible to smaller cities/towns:
50% of the enrolments at Sunstone MOOC are from smaller cities and towns and it is continuously growing. MOOCs is providing great alternative to working professionals and students in Tier-2 cities who never had quality education accessible. These students now access very high quality content with the help of a top notch coach for free.
Deliver high quality international content in Indian context:
Sunstone has developed learning content for Indian audiences by using international content as a reference point. The instructor leading the course put Indian context around the problems that makes it more relevant for the students. For international MOOC, the drop rates are as high as 95%, which has been reduced drastically by making content more local
Hassle free education:
Education systems have become very complex with the regulatory regime, infrastructure requirements, class schedules etc., hence, it can’t serve the purpose of a learner who wants to learn a specific skill in a certain time frame. MOOC presents an educational structure that is primarily about learning, and not degree or certification. For example- Sunstone MOOC has seen many housewives joining the courses to enhance their skills, government employees learning business skills, engineers learning basic finance.
Developing community of learners
With growing numbers every day, the community of learners is getting stronger and it is running in parallel to the existing education systems. Besides working professionals, current students also enrol in MOOCs to learn more than what is offered in their existing educational structure. It is highly likely that MOOCs like Sunstone can become part of existing educational system because of their high quality.
Rajul Garg, Director
Rajul brings in his passion and experience in entrepreneurship, business building and venture funding to the curriculum of Sunstone. Rajul is also the visionary behind the launch of free open online courses (MOOC) by Sunstone.
Rajul was a co-founder of GlobalLogic, a global leader in R&D outsourcing with offices in 8 countries and over 6,000 employees and >Rs 1,500 Cr revenue. He built the operation ground up in India and later helped GlobalLogic expand exponentially through global acquisitions. Earlier, he was also a founder of Pine Labs, a leader in point of sales transactions in India. Rajul has consulted with leading venture capital firms like Sequoia and Battery Capital for their portfolio companies in India. Rajul also consulted with Aavishkaar, a micro equity fund, where he focused on exploring education ideas for mass market.
Rajul is a Computer Science Graduate from IIT Delhi.
Dinesh Singh, Director, Student Engagement
Dinesh primarily manages student experience and course facilitation at Sunstone. Dinesh coordinates with the course directors and industry to design the curriculum and keep it industry relevant. He is also involved in counselling students at the time of admissions and spread the awareness of Problem Based pedagogy.
Dinesh spent significant time as a consultant with McKinsey & Co, based out of their Pittsburgh offices in the US. While at McKinsey, he worked with Fortune 500 companies as a strategy consultant in various verticals including Telecom, Education, Healthcare and helped companies design their go-to-market strategies. Previously, Dinesh was a technology entrepreneur and also part of the GlobalLogic start-up team where he led several market facing activities including Marketing and Business Development. Dinesh has deep passion in education and has been involved in the overall ecosystem through his professional engagement as McKinsey Consultant and also as a mentor for Cornell.
Dinesh is a graduate from IIT Kanpur and MBA from Cornell University. CCI Newswire
