The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School has expanded its online offerings of foundational MBA courses to now include a Business Foundations Specialization series that adds a capstone project in which participants can apply what they learn to help solve real-world business issues, the school announced last week. And in another new twist, Wharton will invite top performers in the online series to apply to one of the school’s graduate programs, waiving the application fee, and will award up to five $20,000 scholarships to applicants who are admitted.
As with the initial four courses in Wharton’s Foundation Series – Accounting, Finance, Marketing and Operations Management – the new Capstone Project component is available through online education platform Coursera. Wharton was one of the first leading business schools to present the building blocks of its MBA curriculum in online form to a world audience.
The complete Business Foundations Specialization series combines all four foundation courses, taught by Wharton faculty, with the newly added project component and confers a Coursera Verified Certificate for participants who complete the entire series. As part of the Capstone Project, participants work with industry partners to help solve a specific real-world problem. Snapdeal and Shazam have entered into initial partnerships with Wharton to provide Capstone project topics.
All courses in a Specialization series must be taken through the Coursera Verified Certificate path to be considered completed, and the cost of the entire series with a Verified Certificate is $595.
“The Business Foundations Specialization continues our outreach to students around the world, especially those who want to sample the power of Wharton knowledge,” Wharton Dean Geoff Garrett said in a statement. “We are especially excited about the unique industry partnerships we can offer through the Capstone Project, allowing participants a glimpse into the real challenges businesses face.”
Kunal Bahl, CEO and co-founder of Snapdeal.com, was a student of the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology at Wharton, which he says profoundly influenced his career path. “This is the power of applied knowledge and it gives me immense pleasure to now be in a position to co-create life-changing learning opportunities for a global pool of highly motivated learners in the domain of business foundations,” he said of the partnership with Wharton on the Capstone Project.
The top 50 performers each year in the Business Foundations Specialization series will be eligible to apply to one of Wharton’s graduate business programs without paying an application fee. Wharton will also award $20,000 scholarships to up to five students admitted to the MBA program who have excelled in the Specialization series in the previous 12 months.
“A key component for us as an institution is the possibility to identify talent from a pool of participants who might not have considered business education before,” Garrett added.
