Educational technology has been disrupting traditional instructional practices in executive education, and for good reason.
Learning was once the exclusive domain of schools and universities, especially when it came to delivering executive education in business schools. That meant either taking a sabbatical from your job or choosing a B-school near you. You had to be physically present in the classroom.
Edtech, however, is changing that approach by providing customization and interactive experiences for learners. Educational technology also delivers learning at lowered costs.
Cost
Executive education can be expensive. University tuition, fees, and room and board have risen an average of 11% in the last five years, and prices are continuing to rise. Executive education costs have risen 23%, and an executive MBA can set you – or your employer — back $150,000 or more. As a result, fewer employers are willing to foot the bill for this educational experience, and many hopeful candidates are leery about taking on a bigger burden of debt.
Knowledge
The lower cost of executive education does not mean a lesser standard of learning. In fact, the opposite is true.
Edtech brings influencers and subject matter experts together in a platform that was unimaginable just a couple of decades ago. Executive schedules didn’t always line up with the constraints of a traditional semester, especially when some of the experts were working in a location far away, or when the learners didn’t have time to attend lectures or symposiums. Edtech allows busy executives to access knowledge anytime, anywhere, thanks to distance learning.
The same technology enables professors to reach more students with improved content.
While there’s a lot to be said for convening in person with classmates and colleagues to discuss ideas, edtech is making it possible to extend those conversations with learners around the world.
New Experiences
Smart schools are choosing to take advantage of edtech opportunities for executive education. They are partnering with online companies to create blended opportunities for learning. These opportunities include traditional campus-based classes as well as digital coursework and instructional settings.
In addition, AI and experiential learning are giving students the kind of hand-on experiences they might not otherwise get, and virtual reality is augmenting their experiences.
By lowering costs, expanding on a growing body of knowledge and creating opportunities for new experiences, edtech is transforming executive education.
Hi Matthew, great insights here. We (from HiHaHo) have recently marketed an interactive video tool that we specifically designed for education. We first exclusively focussed on the educational branch (from elementary schools to universities), but found it hard to market the tool, mostly because of budget restraints. Schools are not known for being rich so to speak.
That is why we broadened our scope and we indeed experience, what you mention, that there is a need of educational technology in the corporate branch, for employee on-boarding, supplementary courses etcetera. Through technology, costs can be lowered and the quality of education improved. Also, and that’s nice for us 😉 there is usually a bigger budget. Fortunately, awareness of the added value of edtech in the corporate branch is growing. Thanks for the insightful article.
Btw, we think education is really important and want to carry our weight in improving education and make it accessible for everyone. So the increasing awareness in the corporate branch actually enables us to make the tool better accessible for teachers, by providing them advantages, and thus the corporate branch is, probably without knowing it, improving education by using our product 😉
Kind regards,
Gerben Veenema
Part of the cost is marketing to reach companies and people. Marketing technologies are also taking their role into the education field, with orientation chat bots and matchmaking marketplaces like ours.
It can definitely decrease the cost of education.