For years, every time I found myself in a period of transition I thought about enrolling in business school. When I was in my twenties and trying to figure out my career path, those transition moments came up fairly often. But every time I did the maths – two years out of the workforce, foregone earnings, cost of living expenses, and the price of the MBA itself – the numbers never seemed to add up.
Then I discovered MOOCs.
I found out about massive open online courses (MOOCs) in 2012, when free courses from prestigious universities were still relatively new. Fittingly, 2012 was what The New York Times called “the year of the MOOC,” due to the explosion in popularity of these free courses. The first movers – Coursera, edX, Udacity – have now been joined by many other MOOC providers, some offering all content free of charge and others charging a fee for some or all of their courses.
It wasn’t until a year after I first heard about free online courses that I started my own MOOC adventure. As I approached another transition moment – this time I was getting married and moving across the world with my new husband – I thought again about getting a business education. Only this time, I wondered if it would possible to use MOOCs to get the skills and knowledge I wanted.
I scoured the web for anyone who might be writing about getting a free MOOC-based MBA. Although I found several articles suggesting that such a thing was now possible given the wide variety of MOOC offerings, I didn’t find anyone blogging about their own experience fashioning a complete business curriculum from free courses. The No-Pay MBA was born when I decided that in addition to taking an MBA’s worth of free courses, I wanted to document my journey – both as a way of showcasing what I’d learned and as a resource for others.
The right candidate for a MOOC-based MBA equivalent