Leveraging the
power of content
sharing and
virtual exchange:
ESMT Berlin
The market for premium blended business education in the corporate market began to take off for ESMT Berlin from 2017. Almost all requests for proposals from custom executive education clients contained blended elements, and opportunities in the degree space were also becoming significant. Having clear ambitions to become a market leader in high-quality digital education and with recognition that it had significant ground to cover, ESMT pooled resources with three other business schools to create the FOME Alliance.
Along with fellow founding members—Imperial College Business School, Singapore Management University, and BI Norwegian Business School —ESMT was determined to shape the future of online learning within the sphere of business education. This objective formed the basis of the alliance, the purpose of which was to share best practice and to provide the very best online educational experiences for learners. Originating in the EdTech Lab at Imperial College Business School, the insendi LXP served as the technology underpinning FOME members’ ambitions. The FOME Alliance quickly gained the attention of business schools worldwide for its groundbreaking innovation in the online space. Since its inception in 2018, the FOME Alliance has expanded to include twelve schools, with a global representation.
As a founding member and recent FOME Chair, ESMT has helped to shape the direction of the alliance through its evolution from a select group of schools to a fully-fledged global consortium. As the alliance has matured, ESMT and fellow members have progressed many key initiatives. These include the creation of a structured mechanism for sharing courses and content as well as faculty resource and expertise, the implementation of cross-institution virtual exchanges, and collective investment in scouting for new EdTech innovations together with SuperCharger Ventures.
ESMT recently launched its Global Online MBA, highlighting the continued expansion of its online and blended portfolio and its long term vision for digital education. Supported by the insendi platform and enhanced by online tools and technologies adopted in the course of ESMT’s rapid digital transformation, this fully stackable program has opened up new markets and provided an unprecedented level of flexibility for students. Membership to the FOME Alliance has allowed ESMT to benchmark new technologies at speed, and in turn to share their own successful adoption of specific tools with fellow members.
FOME’s Course and Content Sharing initiative exemplifies collective efforts to strengthen each institution’s offering through access to fellow members’ courses, content, and expertise. ESMT has accessed the content marketplace as both a buyer and seller. As Nick Barniville, Director of the EdTech Lab at ESMT, attests, course sharing is a springboard for further collaboration across the alliance:
“We buy in courses from other insendi partners. We will only develop courses ourselves if we see significant multiple-use potential, so for more specialized courses it’s more efficient and cheaper for us to buy them in. Then we are ‘visiting faculty’ and the platform makes that possible.”
“For the future, we see interesting opportunities for joint degrees and for joint licensing of content from multiple schools. Currently, it’s buying and selling at an individual course level but perhaps as a next step, swapping or selling a specialization.”
Members of this group have taken an active role in creating the mechanisms for promoting their courses, through an online catalogue, and a course preview site. ESMT has worked with fellow members to create a vibrant marketplace.
FOME has provided an invaluable community of like-minded business education specialists for ESMT, where both its Learning Design team and its academics play an active role in shaping the future of high-quality online learning. From having previously had little online course development and delivery experience, ESMT has developed rapidly to become a front-runner in digital education provision. FOME members have also recognised ESMT’s clear commitment to high-quality online learning: ESMT’s Learning Design team was awarded gold for the first-ever FOME Learning Design Innovation Award at the FOME Conference in November 2021.
