Critical perspectives on management

I am taking my first Coursera course, a MOOC, that is, a massive open online course run through IE Business School, starting on the 13th of January and running for a period of six weeks. I will take this course with a friend who has not only a fair amount of practical management experience, but also a strong academic background and is pretty intelligent to boot. I am looking forward to working together, discussing concepts and case studies and looking at the learning systems both Cousera and IE adapt for their learning platforms. I took this course as both the content looked interesting, the length of the program relatively short (not too taxing) and between one to three hours per week is required - all in all, not bad for an entry level course.

I had not heard of IE Business School before, a web check tells me this is a graduate school founded in 1973 as Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, Spain. The school ranks highly with Forbes, Financial Times, The Economist, Businessweek and the Aspen Institute for MBAs, Master of Management and Master of Finance. The facilitator looks very well credentialed with a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from McGill University and PhD from Northwestern University. Despite being a Spanish institution, the course will be in English, but I note courses in Madrid can be both in Spanish and English.

Coursera has teamed up with some very interesting institutions ranging from the Wharton School of Management, Stanford University and John Hopkins University in the United States to the University of Western Australia, University of Zurich, University of Melbourne, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, University of New South Wales and the World Bank. Looking forward to my first MOOC experience.