One of the best things about a No-Pay MBA is that you can start one any time. Because new MOOCs are starting pretty much continuously, it isn’t necessary to stick to a semester schedule. Still, it can be helpful to break up the year into chunks, and many new classes are released around when college semesters typically start. So, as we head into spring semester, here are a few tips to help as you choose your courses.
1. Go in with an idea of the topics you’d like to study, but be flexible.
I think it’s a good idea to have an overarching structure to guide you, rather than just taking business courses willy nilly. That said, because it’s hard to predict which courses will be available when, it’s important to remain flexible. For example, I had planned to take a marketing course this semester, but I haven’t found any yet. So instead I’ve chosen to take some advanced courses in finance and entrepreneurship, which I was planning to do the following semester.
2. Choose courses from a variety of sites.
When it comes to business and management courses, Coursera has the best selection by far. But don’t forget about NovoEd, Open2Study, Udacity, and Canvas, all of which have a good selection of business courses as well. Not all of my courses are taught by university professors either. I am working on a Udacity course on entrepreneurship with a teacher who is a phenomenal lecturer with loads of real-world business experience. For my purposes, it doesn’t matter that he isn’t connected with a university.
3. Set up a mail filter.
I highly recommend sending all of your MOOC-related mail to a dedicated folder. If you use Gmail – and who doesn’t these days? – and don’t know how to set up a filter, you can learn how to do it here. As soon as I register for a new MOOC site, I immediately set up a filter to send all mail from that site’s domain name to go to my “MBA” folder. That way, there’s only one place in my inbox to look for all course updates.
4. Do a trial or “shopping” period, then un-register from courses you don’t want to take.
When I was in college, at the beginning of every semester I would register for a dozen classes, attend each of them a couple of times, and then make a final decision about which of them to attend for the entire semester. I recommend a similar strategy for your No-Pay MBA coursework. So far, I am registered for a course in human resources, one on financial markets, one on entrepreneurship, one on financial analysis of entrepreneurial ideas, and one from the HEC School of Management in Paris (in French, I might add) on valuation. If my schedule looks a bit finance-heavy, well it is. I don’t plan to finish all of these courses – I just want to test them out. If you “shop” a bunch of couses before you commit, I think it’s polite to un-register once you’ve decided which ones you’re not interested in finishing. It also cuts down on email clutter.
5. Leave a little room in your schedule for surprises.
Last semester my schedule was so packed I didn’t have time to add any new courses mid-way through. But what if Harvard Business School finally releases it’s long-awaited MOOC series? I want to have some time in my schedule to take a really good course that pops up.
