MOOC: Private Equity and Venture Capital Born On Demand

STEFANO CASELLI'S MOOC IS POSED TO HAVE A VERSION FOR BOCCONIANS LIVING ABROAD AND WILL BE INCORPORATED IN A BLENDED LEARNING COURSE

An increasing number of young entrepreneurs are eager to understand the mechanisms underpinning the private equity and venture capital actors’ behavior – that is potential investors in their ventures. “They’re going to take advantage of my course”, says Stefano Caselli, Full professor of Finance and teacher of the Private Equity and Venture Capital MOOC. The course will be available on-demand on the Coursera platform. It will be presented on 12 October, during a webinar related to Start-up Day, a Bocconi University event aimed at promoting youth entrepreneurship that will tale place on 24 November.
 
Private Equity and Venture Capital features videolectures, software programs to do quantitative analysis, interviews with Fabio Sattin (Private Equity Partners), Luca Peyrano (Borsa Italiana), Eugenio Morpurgo (Fineurop Soditic), and Raffaele Legnani (H.I.G. Capital). “I’ve benefitted from making it”, Caselli says. “The MOOC taught me a higher sense of responsibility. You have to be extremely focused on content and communication when dealing with a worldwide audience. You have to strike the right balance between the need to talk to everyone and the will to not water down contents”.
 
The experience of making the MOOC was inspiring in many ways. A “premium” version has been produced especially for Bocconi students living abroad. It will be published in February 2016. Then, in 2017, Caselli will turn his traditional course, which is called Private Equity and Venture Capital as well, into a blended learning experience: frontal lectures will be enhanced by MOOC’s elements.
 
To this day, all Bocconi MOOCs were session based, that is courses that you have to follow at a certain pace. Once they were over, they were re-published on the Coursera platform as on-demand courses. Private Equity and Venture Capital is the first Bocconi MOOC to go online straight away as on-demand. The change responds to the request of users who want to follow a course at their own pace and can’t do it with session based lectures. But persuading new users to sing-up is not enough. You have to make them stay and, unfortunately, the drop-out rate increases when students aren’t given deadlines.
 
Giving users pressing deadlines discourages them, leaving them free is too risky. How do you keep people engaged? “The solution is an hybrid form of on-demand”, says Valentina Todoro, project manager at BETA, the Bocconi laboratory for research and development on teaching methods. “It’s a self-paced course that keeps a sense of community”. It will be the standard of the forthcoming Bocconi MOOCs. When users have signed up, the system includes them in a virtual classroom and suggests deadlines and quizzes. If the student doesn’t keep up with the assignments, he is included in the following virtual classroom. “Yet the session based format better fits courses such as Managing Fashion and Luxury Companies that require a high level of interaction and activities outside the Coursera platform”.

by Claudio Todesco