2012年，沃頓商學院讓營銷學教授彼得?法德等三人籌建該院最早的網絡課程之一。法德教授按要求去了費城第二大街和南大街交匯處的籌備地點。在別人的指揮下，他平生第一次對著攝像機鏡頭，而不是學生講課。

法德教授笑著說：“他們打開了攝像機，然后說‘咱們做一場慕課（MOOC，即大型網絡公開課）吧’。我根本不知道自己在干嗎。在這方面沒有任何先例，也沒有別的人在做這樣的事。”

為了避免經典營銷概念“滿堂灌”讓課程變得沉悶，法德教授挑選了沃頓營銷專業選修課的一些材料。當時，他甚至想不出誰會來上這門名為《營銷學入門》的網絡課程，這也是沃頓推出的首批慕課之一。

法德教授開玩笑說：“我的第一感覺是只有老年人、家庭主婦或者蹲監獄的才會來上這門課。”但出乎其預料，實際情況證明，聽慕課的大有人在。其中有大學本科或更高學歷的人占90%以上。受眾的年齡介于25-44歲，而且絕大多數都有全職工作。

法德教授的第一門網絡課程2012年開播后，工程師和經理人從世界各地給他發來了電子郵件。對此，法德教授頗感吃驚。他說：“這些人的水平跟我們的MBA學生如出一轍。給我發電郵的有巴基斯坦的工程師，還有許許多多不可能有機會到沃頓來讀書的人。”

三年后，《營銷學入門》的結業學生超過了30萬人，這門課也成為網絡教育平臺Coursera今年的十佳商業慕課之一。還有近10萬人完成了第二門慕課《消費者分析》。同時，法德教授推出了試驗性企業高管培訓課程，名為《消費者關系的戰略價值》，為期八周，其中包括每周一次的“彼得面談”，基本上就是在法德教授的辦公室授課一小時，對象為交了3700美元來上這門課的二三十名學生。2016年春天，法德教授將第五次推出這門課。

2012年以來，共有約270萬人報名參加沃頓的18門慕課課程。更重要的是，從那時起該學院已經頒發了5.4萬張文憑，而且2015年4月以來還頒發了3.2萬張專業課程結業證書。最初，沃頓把慕課作為一次網絡試驗；而今沃頓可借此在2015年增收500萬美元。

在這個過程中，沃頓確立了自己在慕課領域的領先位置。它是第一家推出慕課的商學院，第一家在Coursera上推出專業課程和系列相關課程的商學院，也可能是世界上慕課學生最多的商學院之一。

另一個關鍵點在于，如今沃頓在慕課上的投入增加了一倍。該學院計劃在今后12個月內至少新開24門網絡課程，包括首批SPOC（小型封閉式網絡課程）。這批SPOC涉及三個專業，分別是數字營銷、游戲化和高級產品設計。這三門課將登陸EdX平臺，后者是由哈佛大學和麻省理工資助的非營利性初型創教育公司。在Coursera上，每門慕課收費95美元，SPOC的費用則要高得多。

到2016年7月，沃頓還會把網絡專業課數量從兩門提高到五門。該學院預計，2016年的慕課收入將翻番，達到至少1000萬美元。

這些大手筆投入來自沃頓的新院長杰弗里?加勒特，他認為此舉可進一步提升沃頓品牌的全球知名度，接觸到那些永遠無法到費城沃頓校區的受眾，還會讓教師更放心地把科技用于教學，并改變師生在教室中的互動方式。

加勒特生于澳大利亞，是一位政治科學家，2014年7月成為沃頓的院長。他說：“上任時我對這份工作的兩個想法都已得到證明。一個想法是許多沒辦法到沃頓校園里來的人都想接受沃頓的教育，從而形成了一個實實在在的市場。第二個想法是現在我們知道怎樣聰明地把科技融入我們的線下在校課程。”

據加勒特介紹，如今超過10%的沃頓教師都有了開設和教授網絡課程的經驗。也就是說，有30多位教授參與了沃頓的慕課工作。專業課需要多位教師共同打造一系列課程，每位教授都要提供一周到三周的教學材料。舉例來說，沃頓的商業分析專業課就由12位教師共同完成。

加勒特說，他發現可以用慕課來發現人才，而且后者最終可能會到沃頓來讀MBA課程。同時，沃頓開發的教學內容確實可以替代非學歷教育，成為沃頓線下在校高管培訓課程的延伸。

他指出：“如果有助于人們在職場上進步，它就得到了自下而上的驗證。非學歷教育會有相當迅猛的發展，因為會有人覺得拿學位或者傳統高管培訓的學費和機會成本并不合理。”

早期的慕課完全免費，而且可以提供結業證明。現在，沃頓正在迅速把這些在線課程轉化為主要收入來源。去年4月，沃頓率先把Coursera上的在線學歷收費從49美元提高到了95美元。

沃頓網絡教育部門主任安妮?楚姆伯恩說：“做出這項決定前我們緊張地考慮了六個星期。但提高收費后，共有3.2萬人在我們付了學費，并拿了結業證書。僅此一項就讓總收入增加了300萬美元。”

沃頓的商業基礎和商業分析專業課都設有四門課程和一個畢業設計項目，收費均為595美元。

沃頓上個月把全球策略課從Coursera轉移到了EdX，并將其作為收費149美元的試點課程。沃頓創新集團董事總經理唐?休斯曼說：“在EdX上報名聽課的人數和在Coursera上完全一樣。”他認為今后沃頓可以進一步提高網絡教育收費。休斯曼指出：“畢竟，亞馬遜上賣的一本二手公司財務教材都要200美元。我們已經能輕松盈利。這里可是沃頓啊！”

戰略上的重視不光讓沃頓成為推出慕課并借此吸引大批學生的商學院龍頭，還讓它成為熟練掌握這項技術并在全球范圍內傳播知識和品牌的主要院校。接受沃頓網絡教育的學生有三分之二來自北美以外，印度、中國、俄羅斯和拉美在其中占了很大比重。

加勒特說：“其中許多人都有學位，還有許多人來自美國以外，這讓我們很意外。我們接觸到了以前也許永遠也無法接觸的學生。讓數百萬人來接受你的教育，這其中的營銷價值不可低估。”

有一點很清楚，那就是沃頓通過這方面的開拓得到了一些重要經驗。休斯曼指出：“我們的工作曾以產品為中心，最初的慕課時長6-12周。那時我們甚至都沒有想到許多人都很忙，日程表排的很滿。現在，我們更多地以學生為中心，而且會考慮他們需要什么。他們的希望是把課時壓縮到四個星期。”

除了更短的教學周期，沃頓還發現學生希望上內容具體的課程。休斯曼說：“我們把精力集中在一個商業題目的能力培養上。如果你是總經理，但不太了解客戶分析，那你或許會希望大量學習這方面的內容。這樣，在會上進行討論時你就有東西可談。”

沃頓相信，到目前為止的情況表明，學生更喜歡所謂的異步式網絡教育，也就是說他們隨時隨地都可以上課。休斯曼說：“市場不需要同步教育。如果你在北京而我在費城，我們就找不到合適的時間來同時上線。”

另一個重要經驗是教授慕課課程不是為了成名，盡管它可能讓教師短暫地當一回名人。休斯曼堅持認為：“網絡教育的重點不在教，而是在學。我們投入資金的目的不是讓教師覺得自己已經像奧普拉?溫弗瑞那樣成為21世紀的著名脫口秀主持人。”

沃頓慕課戰略的最大潛在益處可能會充分體現在老式的線下課堂里，這也許有點兒諷刺意味。

休斯曼說：“我們目前所做的是利用科技把知識單向傳播到教室以外，價值含量較低。如今，教師在課堂上宣講顯得有些沉悶。如果把課程挪到教室以外，授課過程就會變得非常有意思。”

他指出，減少機械的講授時間后，教師就可以把時間更多地用于在沃頓舊金山分校組織充滿活力的討論，或者帶領學生在遠離費城校區的地方進行體驗式教學。

休斯曼認為：“這可以讓教師獲得更多自由時間，這樣他們給予學生的學習體驗就能真正改變后者的人生。慕課正在提高面對面教育的標準。”

加勒特也持這樣的觀點。他說：“我們的終極希望是用網絡教育內容來改善線下課堂中學生的體驗。我們希望線下課堂有更多的互動，以團隊為導向，并集中于解決問題。我們往往會采用‘思而學之’的方式，但我覺得以后我們得用‘做而學之’的方法來予以平衡。”（財富中文網）

譯者：Charlie

校對：詹妮

When marketing professor Peter Fader was asked to be one of three professors to build one of the first online classes at Wharton in 2012, he was marched to the corner of Second and South Streets in Philadelphia and told to face the lens of a video camera instead of students for the first time in his life.

“They turned the camera on and said ‘Let’s do a MOOC,” he laughs. “I had no idea what I was doing. There were no precedents. No one else was doing this.”

Looking to avoid a dull class filled with 101 marketing concepts, he cherry picked material from Wharton’s elective courses in marketing. At the time, Fader could not even imagine who would want to take the online course, an Introduction to Marketing, one of the first MOOCs Wharton would offer.

“My first impression was that the only people who would want this were senior citizens, housewives, or somebody in prison,” he quips.

Contrary to Faber’s initial expectations, MOOC learners turned out to be an impressive bunch. More than 90% have some college and most have a bachelor’s degree or higher. The age of learners tends to range from 25 to 44, and the vast majority are employed full time.

When Fader’s first course went live in 2012, he was amazed to get emails from engineers and managers all over the world. “These people are every bit the caliber of our MBA students,” he says. “I’d get an email from an engineer in Pakistan and lots of other people who would never have had the chance to come to Wharton.”

Three years later, more than 300,000 people have taken Wharton’s Intro to Marketing course, one of the top 10 business MOOCs on the Coursera platform this year. Nearly 100,000 more have completed his second MOOC on Consumer Analytics. Fader also has piloted an eight-week-long executive education MOOC offering called the Strategic Value of Customer Relationships, which includes weekly “Pete Casts,” essentially hour-long office hours for the 20 to 30 students who have enrolled in the $3,700 course It will be offered for a fifth time this spring.

Since 2012, some 2.7 million people have enrolled in Wharton’s 18 MOOC courses. More importantly, the school has awarded 54,000 verified certificates since 2012 and 32,000 verified certificates in specialization courses since April of last year. What started as something of an online experiment will bring an additional $5 million in revenue to Wharton in 2015.

Through it all, Wharton has firmly established itself as the leading business purveyor of MOOCs. It was the first business school to offer a MOOC, the first to offer a specialization, or series of related courses, on Coursera, and can boasts one of the highest MOOC enrollments of any business school in the world.

No less crucial, the school is now doubling down on its bet on MOOCs. Over the next 12 months, Wharton plans to launch at least two dozen new online offerings, including its first three SPOCs (small private online courses) on digital marketing, gamification, and advanced product design. They will all be offered on the EdX platform, the non-profit education startup founded by Harvard and MIT, at significantly higher price points than the $95 certificates for its single MOOC courses on Coursera.

Wharton also will bump up the number of specializations from two to five through July of this year. The school is predicting that its MOOC revenues will double next year, to at least $10 million.

The big bet is being placed by Wharton’s new Dean, Geoffrey Garrett, who views the initiative as a way to further extend the school’s brand around the world; reach users who would never be able to get to the school’s Philadelphia campus; get faculty more comfortable using technology to teach; and transform how faculty and students engage in the classroom.

“Coming into the job, I had two conjectures about it that have been borne out,” says Garrett, an Australia-born political scientist who became dean in July of 2014. “One, there is a real market for a taste of Wharton education for lots of people who can’t be on campus,” he says. “And second, we now know how to smartly integrate technology in the on-campus courses.”

More than 10% of our faculty have now had experience building and running online classes, he says. That translates into more than 30 professors who have been involved in Wharton’s MOOC efforts. Specializations involve multiple faculty working together to create a set of courses, with each professor contributing anywhere between one and three weeks worth of material. Wharton’s business analytics specialization, for example, represents the combined effort of 12 different faculty members.

Garrett says that he has since discovered that MOOCs can be used to identify talent that may ultimately come to campus for the school’s MBA program, and that the content Wharton has been developing can be a viable alternative to non-degree education, long the province of the school’s on-campus executive education programming.

“If it helps a person advance his or her career, it’s a bottom-up credential,” he says. “Non-degree education will increase pretty dramatically for those who find that the tuition and opportunity costs of either a degree or traditional executive education don’t make sense.”

While the early MOOCs were entirely free, including a statement of completion, Wharton is fast moving into a place where its portfolio of online offerings can become a substantial source of revenue for the school. Wharton led all schools on Coursera last April when it raised the cost for a verified certificate from$49 to $95.

“There was six weeks of anxiety over that decision,” says Anne Trumbone, director of Wharton’s online learning initiative. “But since then we’ve had 32,000 people pay for verified certificates. That is more than $3 million in gross revenue alone.”

The school’s specializations in business fundamentals and business analytics, composed of four courses plus a capstone project, cost $595 each.

Wharton also took its Global Strategy course, originally distributed on Coursera, and moved it to the EdX platform last month in a pilot at a cost of $149. “We got enrollment numbers that were just as good as Coursera,” says Don Huesman, managing director of Wharton’s innovation group, who believes the school can further raise prices in the future. “After all,” he says, “a used corporate finance textbook on Amazon goes for $200! We’re already making money hand over fist. This is Wharton!”

This strategic focus has not only made Wharton the business school leader in producing MOOCs and reaching a massive audience with them. Wharton also has become one of the major players in mastering the use of the technology to spread its knowledge and brand across the world. Two-thirds of the learners who have taken Wharton’s courses are outside North America, with heavy representation from India, China, Russia, and Latin America.

“The stats on how many people already have degrees and are outside the U.S. just hits us in the eyes,” says Garrett. “We are reaching learners we never would have reached. The pure marketing value of having millions of people sampling your education cannot be undervalued.”

One thing’s for sure: Wharton’s pioneering efforts have paid off in some important lessons. “Our efforts were product-centric and our original MOOCs were six-to-12 weeks long,” says Huesman. “We didn’t even think that a lot of people have busy lives with demanding schedules. Today, we’re being more customer-centric and asking what people need. They want the learning squished down into four weeks.”

Besides the shorter cycles, Wharton gained insight was what learners hoped to get out of a particular course. “We honed in on the concept of literacy in a business topic,” Huesman says. “If you are a general manager and don’t know a lot about customer analytics, you might want to binge learn this so you can go to a meeting and knowledgeably participate in the discussion.”

Wharton believes its experience thus far proves that students prefer so-called asynchronous online learning that they can tap into at any time, no matter where they are in the world. “The market doesn’t require synchronous learning,” says Huesman. “If you re in Beijing and I’m in Philadelphia, there is no good time to get together.”

Another crucial lesson was that MOOCs were not about fame, despite the nearly instant celebrity status a MOOC might provide a faculty member. “This stuff is not about teaching,” insists Huesman. “It’s about learning. You don’t invest money to make faculty think they are Oprah Winfrey in the 21st Century.”

Ironically, perhaps, the greatest as-yet unrealized benefit of Wharton’s MOOC strategy may well be seen in old bricks-and-mortar classrooms.

“What we’re doing is using technology to get the low value, one way transmission of knowledge outside of the classroom,” says Huesman. “It is dumb to have a faculty member stand up in front of a class and deliver a lecture today. If we get that out of the classroom, all kinds of interesting things can happen in class.”

Less time devoted to that kind of rote teaching, Huesman says, would free up faculty to spend more time heading dynamic discussions at Wharton’s San Francisco campus or leading teams of students on experiential learning opportunities far afield from its Philadelphia campus.

“It can free up faulty time so they can craft learning experiences with students that are truly life changing,” says Huesman. “MOOCs are raising the bar for face-to-face education.”

Garrett agrees. “Ultimately, we want to use online content to provide a better experience for our students in the classroom,” he says. “We want class to be more interactive, team oriented and focused on problem solving. We tend to be in the learning-by-studying moment, but I think we are going to have to balance that with learning-by-doing.”