Making Business Education Available to All: Reviewing the 100 Million Learners Global Initiative
On January 20, 2022, Thunderbird School of Global Management and Arizona State University launched the Francis and Dionne Najafi 100 Million Learners Global Initiative. They set the ambitious goal of enrolling 100 million students by 2030, and the crazy part was that they wanted to do it all for free. Supported by a $25 million donation from Francis and Dionne Najafi, they promised the delivery of three educational tracks: graduate-level courses, undergraduate-level courses, and a “Bootcamp” for people without a high school diploma. All of these tracks would focus on the central theme of Global Management, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation but would meet learners where they were at.
As soon as I heard about this initiative, I put my name on the waiting list for the graduate-level track. As most of you know, I was a business undergraduate, and I continue to work as an insurance underwriter. While most of my writing and online profiles emphasize (deliberately) the academic side of my life, the business world is a big part of my life. At the extremely affordable price of zero dollars, I also figured that I had nothing to lose. If this program turned out to be a waste of time, I wasn’t out anything. I hoped it would be interesting, though.
There was another very intriguing incentive for completing this program. By completing the five-course curriculum and earning a Certificate of Global Management, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation, I would be in a position to earn 15 graduate credits. I am basically a permanent student, but I am a permanent student on a budget. Most of my extra money gets channeled toward my future real estate investments, so I don’t want to pour tons of money into another degree program right now. While this Certificate is clearly designed as a segue into the Master of Applied Leadership and Management program at Thunderbird/ASU with identical course titles, I would guess that there may be some transfer value into, hopefully, an MBA program (although I have not researched this at all).
Overall, the certificate program made sense for me, so I decided to dive in when the inaugural class, Global Leadership and Personal Development, opened in early April. Much of the curriculum is what you would expect from an online program that clearly must be quite efficient to handle the volume of learners they are hoping to educate. There are many multiple-choice quizzes and tests accompanied by hours of video. While I suppose it is hypothetically possible to fail, you are shown the correct answers when your quizzes are graded. Then, you still have two more chances at each quiz and exam (although the questions sometimes vary on the retries), so you would have no excuse whatsoever for failing.
The videos are very high quality and are aesthetically pleasing. Many of the business concepts they presented were familiar to me from my undergraduate days, but the professors were engaged and quite interesting. I watched the videos on 2x speed which was certainly a time-saver. However, most of the presenters spoke quite slowly, and the videos were still very understandable while accelerated.
Global Leadership and Personal Development is divided into 15 modules, covering a wide range of topics from Understanding National Culture to Crisis Management to Leading to Amplify Your Impact. The professors continually emphasize the necessity of a global mindset as the world is constantly getting smaller, and globalization is likely here to stay. As business leaders, it is essential not only to understand yourself, your leadership style, and your leadership techniques, but it is also important to understand cultural norms around the world or even from other parts of diverse countries like the United States. One of the presenters tells a story of a soda executive trying to expand into Saudi Arabia. He did not know how to speak Arabic, so he decided to present his pitch using pictures. The leftmost picture showed a man fainting in the desert, the middle panel showed a man drinking a soft drink, and the rightmost panel showed the man perked up, ready to run off into the sunset. His campaign flopped miserably, and he wasn’t sure why. As he talked to one of his coworkers about his predicament, the man smiled. Why? Arabic is read right to left, not left to right, so the logical progression that made sense to him did not make sense to his audience. They saw a man drinking a soda that dehydrated him rather than invigorated him.
Whether or not the story is true, this class is saturated with this kind of thinking. If you are trying to do business in a culture different from your own, you need to understand who you are and what works for you. Self-awareness is critical. However, you must be aware of the market you are attempting to enter. If you fail to understand that half of the equation, assuming that your product or service will automatically translate to another market segment, you are doomed for failure. Several professors pointed out that we don’t need to adopt values that are not our own and are allowed to believe that things are wrong. However, we must understand where other people are coming from if we want to build trust and conduct business. It is possible to understand without condoning or even agreeing.
Another exciting feature of this program is that it is brand-new. Therefore, the professors talk a good deal about the impact of the pandemic on global business. At least for me, I found those discussions fascinating as we consider the implications of not only a public health crisis but an economic crisis that rocked the world. It is not the focal point of this class, but many of the anecdotes came back to coronavirus, which might be of interest.
From my perspective, the biggest drawback of this program is, ironically, how easy it is. It is hard to judge how much value any credential or Certificate will have if it is practically impossible to fail. Also, just in terms of my own diligence, if the quizzes were a little more difficult or had a bit less leeway, I probably would have studied a little more before taking them, which would have helped me learn more. That being said, transferring the credits at least within Thunderbird/ASU to pursue a leadership degree with 50% of the Master’s credits already earned will help reduce costs for people like myself who are on a budget while providing greater legitimacy to one’s credentials. The materials are also high quality, so, like most independent study curricula, this program is what you make it. You can learn a lot in this program, and if you are pursuing it for educational enrichment, I think you will be very satisfied with at least the first class, which is the only one available now. It caused me to reflect on my own leadership abilities and areas that I need to improve, which is another good outcome.
The remaining four classes in the Certificate program have not been released yet, although I hope they will be soon while I am on a roll and want to continue. I hope they will be as high quality. As someone interested in learning and business, I enjoyed the experience. I recommend it to all of you. If you don’t like it, you have nothing to lose, but there is much information to gain.