Best Free MOOCs In Business For October

Entrepreneurship 102: Who Is Your Customer?

School: MIT Sloan

Source: edX

Registration Links: Entrepreneurship 102

Start Date: October 1, 2015 (6 Weeks Long)

Workload: 4 Hours Per Week

Instructor: Bill Aulet

Credentials: Professor Aulet is a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan, where he teaches courses like New Enterprises and Applications of Advanced Entrepreneurial Techniques. In addition, he serves as the Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, which supports student entrepreneurship at MIT’s five schools. Before entering academia, Professor Aulet was an entrepreneur who raised over $100 million dollars to fund his ventures, which created hundreds of millions of dollars in market value. He is the author of Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup and was recently awarded the Adolf F. Monosson Prize for Entrepreneurial Mentoring at MIT.

Graded: A Certificate of Achievement will be awarded to students who successfully complete each course.

Description: Applying a similar format as the 101 course, Entrepreneurship 102 will focus on how companies “developed their product concepts, solved their customer’s problem, established a clear value proposition, refined their secret sauce, and understood their competition.” (Here is a description of Entrepreneurship 101: Using a case study method, this course will conduct reviews of MIT entrepreneurs in markets ranging from 3-D printers to mobile electronics. Students will learn how to go from formulating ideas to profiling customers who will buy their solution. Students will also complete practical exercises and steps to help them prepare their idea for market).

Review: “I believe I was able to sneak peak the content of the course ahead of the launch on December 2, 2014. I thoroughly enjoyed the logical flow of the content, the recap of each module prior to another beginning, the funny cartoons and caricatures that further define key terms, and listening to the student testimonials. This is an excellent deep dive into a complex topic and I give the course two thumbs up. Can’t wait to get BACK in December.” For additional reviews, click here.

Additional Notes: Unlike many MOOCs, you can view the videos for this course on your schedule. The University of Maryland also offers a course called “Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies: The First Step in Entrepreneurship.” It was ranked the #1 Entrepreneurship course on Coursera and the #8 overall business course on Coursera according to CourseTalk.  It is available here. The University of North Carolina has What’s Your Big Idea available through Coursera, while Udacity offers a “How To Build A Startup” course that is available here.

In addition, Stanford University makes a wide range of free entrepreneurship courses available online through its NovoEd platform. These courses include: Technology Entrepreneurship, Financing and New Ventures, and Financial Analysis of New Ideas. To access the NovoEd platform, click here.

To access the Entrepreneurship 101 course, click here.