DEMOCRATIZING ACCESS TO EXCELLENCE FOR THE SOCIAL SECTOR
“Nothing like this has ever been done to democratize access to excellence for the social sector,” Mangan says. “The world of business schools and high-caliber nonprofits have done a great job of hand picking a small number of very talented social entrepreneurs, but never before has anyone provided a platform with a high degree of excellence that will allow anyone with access to the internet to have access to those tools.”
Haas will play an ongoing role with Philanthropy University, helping to shape the curricula and form a network of organizations that will use the platform to increase their impact. Haas faculty will be joined by faculty from other top universities worldwide in teaching the courses, and the school’s Global Social Venture Competition will also be integrated as part of the experience. The result will be an open innovation platform that helps build a global online community where people share different forms of intellectual property and learn from each other, not unlike open source code, says Mangan. “It’s a big deal—this is really ground breaking,” he stresses.
The courses themselves far outdistance traditional nonprofit webinars currently available to those working in the social impact field. Each course will last between five and eight weeks and will focus on team-based experiential learning.
INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY FOSTERS ENGAGEMENT, SELF-ACCOUNTABILITY
The technology underpinning the initiative was developed by NovoEd, a San Francisco‒based education technology firm. “It was important to have collaboration and engagement built into the experience,” says Jennifer Hu, who led the Philanthropy University Launch Team for NovoEd. “The kind of skills and problems Philanthropy University was developed to address require cooperation,” she continues. “You don’t acquire them in the same way you acquire coding skills—and we have built-in technology and mechanisms that enable this kind of collaboration online.”
For example, says Hu, the team work space is integrated with scheduling tools and Google hangouts to enable participants from around the globe to interact with one another. Some of the courses will involve team assignments, and the technology makes it possible for teams to upload documents, “like” and comment on each other’s work, schedule meetings and collaborate in real time. “You can see discussion topics trending at the moment, see who else is online and view a gallery of multimedia assignments other students have uploaded,” Hu says.
The online platform also enables participants to create a “learner profile,” similar to a LinkedIn profile, which includes information about an individual’s background and experiences and allows for endorsements from other learners or instructors, says Hu. “It reinforces and incentivizes people to keep up their reputations, because your learner profile can ultimately help people find you and recruit you for a team,” she says.
NovoEd was founded not only on the technological but also the psychological principles of social learning, Hu says. By implementing self-accountability, NovoEd has been able to improve the rate of completion for its online classes, which has been a source of frequent criticism of massive open online courses (MOOCs). “What we are doing for Philanthropy University goes far above and beyond what might be traditionally called a MOOC or a webinar because we are trying to encourage an engaging, academically rigorous and comprehensive learning opportunity where participants are motivated to remain involved,” says Hu.
