Un MBA délivré sur Facebook ? Poking, Tagging and Now Landing an M.B.A., New York Times, By D.D. GUTTENPLAN, 28 novembre 2010

Pour lire cet article sur le site du New York Times.

LONDON — Mark Zuckerberg does not have an M.B.A. Indeed, as anyone who’s seen the film “The Social Network” knows, Mr. Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Facebook, is a college drop-out.

But thanks to a pair of young British entrepreneurs, students who do want both a business education and the credential to prove it can now pursue their studies at the same time as they “poke” their friends, tag photos, update their relationship status or harvest their virtual crops on FarmVille.

The London School of Business and Finance Global M.B.A. bills itself as “the world’s first internationally recognized M.B.A. to be delivered through a Facebook application.”

Introduced late last month, the application already has more than 30,000 active users accessing courses in corporate finance, accounting, ethics, marketing and strategic planning, according to the business school.

Aaron Etingen, founder and chief executive of the London School of Business and Finance, said he expected 500,000 prospective students to take the free “M.B.A. test drive” within a year. Students who like what they see will be able to watch video lectures, participate in online peer-to-peer study sessions and track their progress through interactive tests — all without charge.

“There is only a fee if they want to take exams,” said Valery Kisilevsky, the school’s managing director.

Each module is paid for separately, making the total cost of the M.B.A. £14,500, or about $23,000 — the same as for London School of Business and Finance’s campus-based and conventional distance-learning M.B.A. degrees. Like those programs, the Facebook Global M.B.A. degree is certified by the University of Wales. “What we’ve done is eliminate the risk,” Mr. Kisilevsky said.

“The dirty secret of online education is the appallingly low completion rate,” Mr. Etingen said. “Fewer than one in four students who begin an online M.B.A. ever graduate, and it didn’t seem ethical to me to take someone’s money up front, knowing that most of them won’t finish.”

Founded in 2003 with “two rooms and four students” taking accounting courses, according to Mr. Etingen, the London School of Business and Finance currently has 15,000 fee-paying students and locations in London, Birmingham and Manchester in Britain and Toronto in Canada offering programs in marketing, finance, business law and a variety of accounting certifications.

Besides the University of Wales, some courses from the London School of Business and Finance are offered in partnership with the Grenoble Graduate School of Business, a French “grande école” — one of a group of elite professional schools — and Bradford University in Britain, which certifies the school’s Masters in International Law degree. The arrangement with Grenoble includes joint faculty and the possibility for students to take a parallel program at either school. All the existing courses offer the choice of studying online or on campus.

“Our distance learning students have to come in several times during each semester,” Mr. Etingen said. “That’s one reason our completion rate is above 90 percent.”

Mr. Kisilevsky also points to the school’s careful cultivation of close relationships with business and industry through its executive education programs as a factor in the school’s success. They provide professional development courses to clients like Deloitte, KPMG, PwC and the South African mobile phone company MTN.

“We are always asking students to tell us what they liked — and what they didn’t like,” Mr. Kisilevsky said. “And they do ! Only today’s students don’t e-mail, or send in their complaints in writing, or come in to the office. They just post their feedback on Facebook and we are expected to respond.”

It was partly the sense that their students already were using Facebook as a primary means of communication that prompted the school to develop their M.B.A. application. The initial outlay was also not very large. The school has been offering its accounting courses on-line for the past three and a half years through its proprietary InterActive learning platform. Based on Moodle open-source software, InterActive “allows students all over the world to access lecture videos, course materials, e-books, notes, quizzes and tests, interactive case studies, and Live Global Classrooms — our real time, video-based collaborative Web-conference facility for students and staff,” Mr. Kisilevsky said. “And we were already recording all of our lectures in high-definition video and posting them online for internal use.”

For the Global M.B.A., course material had to be broken up into smaller units, Mr. Kisilevsky said, so that instead of a single 45-minute lecture students could watch three lectures of 15 minutes each. Joining the Global M.B.A. is like joining any other Facebook application — would-be students first have to give access to their name, profile picture, Facebook ID and list of friends. “Though it sounds quite intrusive, the access to the friend list is an essential component to be able to deliver the social aspects of the application,” Mr. Kisilevsky said. The idea is for students to see what their colleagues are working on and to help one another with questions and problems.

The application’s home page offers a brief welcome video, information on the program and on getting certified, and an immediate menu of courses on Strategic Planning, Organizational Behavior, Corporate Finance and Marketing Management. Each course in turn is divided into 10 modules, with a video lecture, documents, Facebook discussion and case study material for each module.

In “The Social Network” the actor Justin Timberlake, playing Sean Parker, the Napster inventor and early advisor to Facebook, announces, “In the beginning we lived in caves. Then we lived in houses. Now, we’ll live on the Internet.”

So how does Facebook feel about the fact that life on the Internet now includes the option of getting an M.B.A.?

“We’re just a ubiquitous platform. We don’t comment on how people use the platform,” said Sophie Silver, a spokeswoman for Facebook. Then, lest her “no comment” be seen as a discouragement, she added, “But it’s an exciting thing they’re looking at.”