Cornell debuts biotech, pharma management program

Networking at Cornell Tech

As biotechnology and pharmaceutical professionals continue efforts to make advances in medicinal drug formulation, safety and efficacy, experts in the field are implementing innovations to address regulatory hurdles, research costs and global health challenges.

The new Biotech and Pharmaceutical Management Program offered through the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy is designed to give leaders the opportunity to explore industry trends and cutting edge research with a cohort of peers, executives and renowned faculty from the university.

Read the full story on the Cornell Chronicle.

Pre-college big data certificate offered free to Cornell community

Close-up of hands typing on a laptop

A new pre-college certificate program designed to help high school students develop data analysis skills complementary to a wide range of academic and professional fields will be offered at no cost to the children of Cornell faculty and staff and underserved students nominated by local high schools and other partners.

“Big Data for Big Policy Problems,” offered by eCornell in collaboration with Cornell’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and the School of Continuing Education, is a rigorous, non-credit version of the course offered to Cornell students.

Read the full story on the Cornell Chronicle.

New Cornell certificate emphasizes dialogue in DEI

Photo of group dialogue with one young woman facing camera.

In 2020, hiring for diversity, equity and inclusion roles surged. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, three years later – amid recession fears – companies are cutting DEI leadership positions at a rapid and disproportionate rate, leaving practitioners to seek new ways of continuing efforts to create welcoming work environments.

Dialogue for Change, a new online certificate program from Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Intergroup Dialogue Project (IDP) delivered through eCornell, provides a fresh approach to DEI for team managers and supervisors, executives and all employees interested in building equitable cultures.

“The certificate focuses on four key development areas: human connection, social identity, intergroup communication and strategic change,” said Adi Grabiner-Keinan, executive director for academic DEI education and director of the IDP. “Our goals are to develop participants’ awareness around the four development areas and to strengthen their capacity to make meaningful change at personal, interpersonal and institutional levels.”

Together with Lisa Nishii, vice provost for undergraduate education and professor in the Cornell ILR School, Grabiner-Keinan is co-author of the Dialogue for Change certificate. The duo intends for the program to help professionals promote sustainable institutional change no matter their position on the organizational chart.

In three courses – Counteracting Unconscious Bias, Dialogue Across Difference and Strategic Influence – participants learn and practice skills for intentional connection and communication, and examine ways to impact change in different spheres of influence, including within their teams and organizations. These skills, according to Grabiner-Keinan, are crucial well beyond the field of DEI.

“Skills such as active and generative listening, strategic questioning, purposeful sharing, perspective-taking, withholding judgment and questioning assumptions allow us to lead, communicate and collaborate effectively,” Grabiner-Keinan said. “They enable us to broaden our perspective, learn from a variety of people and situations, bring people together, think creatively and create meaning and vision. Unfortunately, such skills are seldom taught in schools or colleges.”

Dialogue for Change engages students in weekly live sessions. Trained IDP facilitators guide participants through practice conversations within small groups of experts and peers. Each dialogue builds on earlier coursework, enabling the cohort to use new knowledge in real time. Students who complete the program earn professional development credit hours toward human resources and project management certifications.

Each student who earns the Dialogue for Change certificate, Grabiner-Keinan says, will recognize their power to foster inclusion, connection and equity in any role. “An integral part of this program is to identify the agency and responsibility that each of us has. It’s true that leaders and supervisors have more power in institutions, but this program helps people understand that they all have power to make change interpersonally and institutionally within their workplaces.”

The Dialogue for Change certificate program is now enrolling students. Visit the program website to learn more.

Human-Centered Approach to Decision-Making Strategy

C-level executives are recognizing creativity’s role in strategy. A recent global IBM survey of over 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the most vital skillset needed to navigate an increasingly complex world. The ability to generate efficient and effective solutions to problems of significant complexity is a desired skill not only for engineers, but also for anyone whose job requires substantial decision-making.

As a response to the growing need for creative thinking in the business world, Cornell has announced the launch of the new Design Thinking certificate program. Available 100% online through eCornell, this certificate program will help learners adopt a robust, human-centered approach to designing and improving products, experiences, and systems at any scale.

“It’s often a challenge to blend design thinking with traditional systems engineering,” says Sirietta Simoncini, Lecturer at the Cornell School of Engineering and author of the Design Thinking certificate program. “Within this program, learners will leverage systems engineering tools that are integrated with the traditions of design thinking to make decisions that are intuitive, creative, and data-driven.”

Regional planners, engineers, user experience designers, program and product managers, consultants, systems analysts, marketers, and entrepreneurs involved in product conception will all find this certificate program valuable. The program offers a seamless and linear path from course to course, where learners have the ability to bring their group project and peer relationships with them as they move through the program.

Once learners have completed the Design Thinking certificate program, they can immediately begin applying their creativity in the workplace. Their new skills will enable them to define challenges, gather key user insights and emotions to help develop personas and user narratives based on empathy, and generate ideas and prototyping for potential solutions and improvements. In addition, learners will be able to iterate on and refine prototypes using design thinking methodology to ultimately generate a rigorous, viable solution to challenges.

Courses include:

  • Identifying and Framing a Challenge
  • Gathering User Emotions
  • Crafting User Narratives
  • Generating User-Centered Solutions
  • Design Prototyping
  • Testing and Iteration

Upon successful completion of all six courses, learners earn a Design Thinking Certificate from the Cornell School of Engineering.

Teaching Online Sharpens Instruction in the Classroom

Allan Filipowicz, clinical professor of management and organizations at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, recently faced a seemingly impossible task: Teach three days of material in just one day.

Cultural and language barriers made time even tighter. He usually taught the material, on the psychology of leadership, to MBA students in their late 20s who were native English speakers. This particular class was for Middle Eastern senior executives in their 50s for whom English was a second language.

Luckily, Filipowicz had an ace up his sleeve. He had previously worked with eCornell to re-engineer his campus course on the subject into an online certificate program. The design process has transformed the way he and other professors think about and organize how they teach their on-campus courses.

As Cornell’s online learning unit, eCornell delivers online professional certificate programs and executive master’s degree programs. eCornell has offered online learning courses and certificate programs for 17 years to more than 130,000 students around the world at more than 2,000 companies.

“The fact that I did this work with eCornell gave me the ability to take any topic and make it incredibly modular,” Filipowicz said. “I essentially took what was three days’ worth of material and compressed it into one-third of the time without losing either the large ideas or the interrelation between them. You can collapse the structure. It’s like you can fold the course any way you want once you examine it on that level.”

When creating an online course or certificate program, eCornell’s instructional designers work with faculty members to define specific learning outcomes. “Our design process is very much built on what students need to be able to do to be successful in this area, not necessarily what they need to know,” said Chad Oliveiri, eCornell’s vice president of curriculum development.

That could be, for example, how to introduce one’s self to a large group or draft a business plan. Students learn in an interactive, small cohort format to gain skills they can immediately apply in their jobs, Oliveiri added.

The instructional designer and the professor take apart the classroom curriculum and redesign it with an eye toward the student audience, the online format and, above all, the learning objectives for each module. “What are you doing, in that second, that is helping the student achieve the goal in this module?” Filipowicz said. They also decide which tools – video sessions, discussion groups, projects, an assignment done at the workplace – will help the learner achieve those outcomes.

In the process, professors often realize they’ve shifted how they approach on-campus classes they may have been teaching for years.

“It really impacts you,” said Deborah Streeter, the Bruce F. Failing Sr. Professor of Personal Enterprise in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. Streeter’s Women, Leadership and Entrepreneurship class on campus parallels her eCornell Certificate Program in Women in Leadership. “Suddenly you’re thinking, I should go back and look through my learning outcomes for campus and make sure I have thought deeply enough about them,” she said.

And the process forces the faculty member to cast off extraneous details, Streeter said: “It has sharpened the curation of the material.”

For example, she recently created a course on executive presence – that is, the ability to project confidence and leadership. The design process called for a checklist in this area to give students. As Streeter dug into the research, she found a “nauseating” report by a respected source giving contradictory and subjective advice, such as “dress conservatively, but not too conservatively; be attractive, but not sexy; don’t remind people of their daughter, but don’t remind people of their mother; wear jewelry, but not too much.”

She could have just given students the report. Instead, the design process prompted her to define the message she wanted convey. In the end, she told them, do not take any piece of advice unless the results make you feel powerful.

“The design process took me there, because you’re thinking so much about the learner, and when they’re done with that module of the course, what do they have to put into play in their life the next day?” Streeter said.

The design process is a luxury, said Filipowicz, a form of mentoring. “At no time in your professional career does anyone say, ‘Let’s go through your course second by second and think about what each element is doing and ask are there ways to do it better.’”

Streeter agrees.

“Having a second set of eyes on your curriculum is so much fun,” she said. “Somebody’s paying attention to what you’re teaching.”

Applying the Dual-System Approach to Executive Education

For decades, European and Asian countries have embraced the dual-education system for professional development. The concept is built upon a “learn-on-the-job” model, where training is highly targeted, timely, and designed to align individual competencies with broader company goals.

While education costs continue to soar, the dual-education system delivers specific educational tools at a very specific point in time, while keeping the “cost-value proposition” in perfect balance.

This approach can also be applied to executive education because it is an adaptive, agile and proven model for delivering high-quality education. In the dual-education model, executives receive ongoing, timely and targeted training that helps them make the greatest contribution to the organization, while fostering engagement, inspiring a motivational culture and helping to retain the highest-performing executives.

Join Uwe Wagner, a senior eCornell faculty instructor and CEO of Innovative Think Tank International, for a look at how the dual-system approach should be applied to executive education.

 

Introducing the Sales Growth Certificate

In our ever-evolving marketplace, it’s easy for sales teams to be overlooked. But the fact of the matter is, your organization’s sales team is crucial to the organization’s overall health and success. Sales team members must have up-to-date skills and an extensive knowledge of what works—and what doesn’t.

To that end, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Sales Growth, our newest certificate at eCornell! Based on the book Sales Growth: Five Proven Strategies from the World’s Sales Leaders, authored by experts at McKinsey & Company, the five courses within the certificate translate insights from 150 worldwide sales leaders into clear and practical guidelines for action.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you can get a taste of what to expect with eCornell’s summary of the Sales Growth book.

The certificate in Sales Growth will expand on the concepts introduced in the summary, giving you and your team tools and strategies to create a plan to drive real growth in your company. Here’s some of what you’ll learn:

  • The value of micro-market analysis to find hidden and unique opportunities for growth.
  • Strategies to streamline your go-to-market process to increase face time with the highest- priority clients.
  • How to focus your value proposition to the individual needs of the client for higher conversion rates.
  • Tools and techniques to move away from pricing tunnel vision during negotiations.
  • How to choose the right metrics and targets to track for growth.

Each course is two weeks long, so you can earn your certificate within two and a half months. This certificate program is available only to organizations.

To learn more about the certificate, click here! Looking for printable information? Click here.

eCornell and Earning Through Learning Extend Partnership to Bring eCornell to Canada

eCornell is pleased to announce an extension of its partnership with Toronto-based Earning Through Learning until 2017. Since 2006, Earning Through Learning has been offering the best of eCornell’s programs to individual and organizational clients throughout Canada including Best Buy Canada, Vale, TJX Canada and Canadian Imperial Bank of Canada (CIBC). “We value ETL’s in-depth understanding of the Canadian training and development ecosystem and the unique learning needs of professionals in Canada,” said eCornell CEO Chris Proulx.
Individuals and organizations looking to build skills in human resources management, hospitality management, business acumen and leadership development, and project leadership are encouraged to work with ETL. More information about ETL and its range of professional services including eCornell is available

Owning the Brand Promise: Higher Education, Mega Corporations, and Mom & Pops

What do small fine arts colleges in the outer ring of the London suburbs have in common with global brands like Marriott and Toyota? Just like the big players, schools like Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance have to define and communicate their brand promise in a crowded marketplace.

Just like large and small businesses competing against each other with the latest and greatest products, higher education institutions in a MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) world are trying to find their niche and voice in online learning. I recently attended the eLearning 2.0 conference in London, and this was a major theme. The attendees from schools both large and small were wrestling with the issue of how to differentiate themselves both in their local markets and globally. The keynote speaker, Steven Warburton from the University of Surrey, talked about the need for institutions to begin to look outward from their core, and start to explore market realities and strategic partnerships if they are going to survive.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Look beyond your core products and offerings and explore what your customer base (or students) are really asking for. Or, how can you move beyond your comfort zone to solve the problems that potential customers have that they may not even know about?

So what would that mean for a school like Rose Bruford? Do a Google search on “online opera degree.” A number one Google ranking is something marketers work day after day to achieve, tweaking one strategy after the other. And Rose Bruford has that enviable position without even trying! It would not take much for Bruford to refine their marketing message to talk about being the “only” or “oldest” or “most experienced” or “innovative” online opera degree program in the world. A thoughtful buy of Google keywords would help put their ad in front of opera buffs and students worldwide. The possibilities are endless!

Or look at Edge Hill University in northwest England. While their main landing page focuses on the student experience at the physical campus, the school has an online learning star hiding in the English department. There are two huge value propositions here for Edge Hill: they know what they are doing when it comes to online education, and they teach Vampire Fictions (!). Both of these are great lead-ins to positioning themselves in the online education marketplace as both experts and content providers, something any business would love to claim.

The challenge, then, for small businesses, major corporations, and higher education institutions alike, is to find their Vampire Fiction experts and make sure that when fans Google their specialty topic, they achieve Bruford-level results success. Every penny you spend on SEO and SEM marketing should work toward building that brand identity. And supporting it with quality landing page content.

Three Archetypes of the Future Post-Secondary Instructor

Since the dawn of electronic media and its role in higher education, we have been hearing about the end of the “sage on the stage” and the emergence of the “guide on the side.”

In the past decade, we have seen many faculty members embrace the transformation of their role: delivering live video chats, facilitating online discussions in the wee hours of the morning and reviewing online student portfolios.  Yet, at the same time, many faculty have also embraced media to capture their “sage on the stage” lectures for the students in their online courses without much additional pedagogical innovation.

As we look into the next decade, we can imagine a set of online instructor archetypes that will provide a more nuanced spectrum of roles and skills originally envisioned for them.  Let’s meet the “celebrity free agent,” the “ever-connected coach” and the “course hacker.”

The Celebrity Free Agent

When Sebastian Thrun left Stanford University to start Udacity, a massive open online course (MOOC) provider, many began to wonder aloud whether this would be the end of the traditional faculty-university relationship.  If star-powered faculty at major universities could strike out on their own, or perhaps form partnerships and affiliations with each other, could they begin to erode market share from the traditional institutions?  Time will tell.  Certainly, we can expect more faculty members who have top-ranked credentials and excellent presence on-screen to leverage their expertise into powerful new educational brands. These projects will feature more knowledge dissemination than active instruction, but could easily provide both students and institutions with new options. Evidenced by the 100,000+ students registered for Thrun’s MOOC offered through Udacity, or the recent online course project between Clay Christensen and the University of Phoenix, one can see how the traditional measures of faculty-institutional loyalties will be challenged in the next decade.

The Ever-Connected Coach

For many instructors without the star-power of a Thrun or Christensen, the online environment will provide other opportunities for role differentiation. This archetype is the closest to the notion of the “guide on the side.” Using a wide range of social media and networking tools, the Ever-Connected Coach can shift from disseminator of knowledge to learning coach. They might provide an ongoing stream of articles, tips and insights via Twitter. They could form user communities made up of current and past students and employers on LinkedIn to help students master skills that increase their employability, as well as build networks to help them succeed post-course and post-graduation. Conceivably, these instructors might realize they too could break formal ties with the institution, allowing them a more flexible and mobile lifestyle. The next-generation model is similar to that of StraighterLine, a low-cost online education provider, but focused on providing institutions with an in-demand pool of online instructors (excluding the ready-made course content), organized by discipline and highly trained in a set of online, social and mobile tools that maximize learner engagement and retention. An institution looking to scale a program might pair a celebrity faculty member or MOOC with a team of instructors or coaches from an online provider to add a higher level of engagement.

The Course Hacker

The last and perhaps most speculative role of the future online instructor will be the person who digs deep into the data that will be available from next generation learning systems to target specific learning interventions to specific students — at scale. The idea of the Course Hacker is based on the emerging role of the Growth Hacker at high-growth web businesses. Mining data from web traffic, social media, email campaigns, etc., the Growth Hacker is constantly iterating a web product or marketing campaign to seek rapid growth in users or revenue. Adapted to online education, the Course Hacker would be a faculty member with strong technical and statistical skills who would study data about which course assets were being used and by whom, which students worked more quickly or slowly, which questions caused the most problems on a quiz, who were the most socially active students in the course, who were the lurkers but getting high marks, etc.  Armed with those deep insights, they would be continually adapting course content, providing support and remedial help to targeted students, creating incentives to motivate people past critical blocks in the course, etc.

In the coming decade, faculty will have a range of tools to make content more accessible and engaging, better platforms and systems to connect with learners (and connect learners to each other and the broader world) and more data than they ever imagined about how students learn. While some may choose to further specialize with respect to how they teach online — going deep — many will incorporate some aspects of each of these archetypes and become even more effective online instructors, ever-seeking to improve learning outcomes.

Guest Post on The Evolllution