Founded in 2012 by Stanford University professor Amin Saberi and PhD student Farnaz Ronaghi, NovoEd is a for-profit online education company that operates as a MOOC platform. The main emphasis of the NovoEd brand is collaboration, as students are placed into small groups during each course. The website offers both free and paid courses.
Completion Rates:
One of the main critiques of Massive Open Online Courses is their low completion rates. Early reports showed that only 10% of students in MOOCs actually made it through the class. As a result, one of NovoEd’s main selling points is its high completion rates.
35-65% of all students who enroll in a NovoEd MOOC complete the course. That number jumps to 80-100% when students are paying for the course. Additionally, NovoEd has determined that students who are in a course with a team or a mentor are much more likely to achieve success in a MOOC.
Course Format:
Like most MOOC platforms, NovoEd uses video as its main medium of instruction. In a NovoEd course, students will be assigned into groups of four to ten students. This differentiates NovoEd from competitors like Coursera and edX, which generally tend to only utilize forums in an effort to facilitate communication between different parties. Course lengths vary by MOOC, with many offerings lasting longer than eight weeks.
Course Offerings:
NovoEd offers over 165 courses from a variety of subject matters. The categories are listed below along with sample course offerings:
- Entrepreneurship: Startup CEO, Writing a Successful Business Plan
- Finance: Venture Deals, Financial Analysis of Entrepreneurial Ideas
- Business Strategy: Lead Like an Entrepreneur, Finance
- Education: Designing a New Learning Environment, Numbers for Life
- Design & Creativity: Creativity – Music to My Ears
- Math & Sciences: Hippocrates Challenge, Graph Partitioning and Expanders
- Humanities: Practice Based Research in the Arts, Storytelling for Change
- Sandbox: (No offerings available)
Corporate Learning:
As with other MOOC providers, NovoEd has also begun to offer companies the opportunity to use the education platform to train its employees. Employers can create courses designed to impart new skills or develop a better workplace culture. Additionally, NovoEd’s emphasis on teamwork within a MOOC can help to develop organizational cohesiveness.
Partners:
NovoEd has partnered with a variety of organizations in an effort to offer Massive Open Online Courses on its platform.
The company has partnered with the following organizations:
- University College London
- Profesor de la Pontificia Universidad Catรณlica de Chile
- University of Agder
- The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
- Entrepreneurship Center at UCSF
- University of Michigan
- Stanford University
- Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley
- Princeton University
- Darden School of Business, University of Virginia
- University of Maryland
- Babson Global
Additionally, the company has also joined with foundations and other education partners:
- Kauffman Fellows Academy
- Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
- Global Innovation through Science and Technology
- Silicon Valley Education Foundation
- Strategic Decisions Group
- SRI International
- Decision Education Foundation
Finally, NovoEd also has two corporate learning partners: The Ariel Group and Acumen.