Interview with Sunstone B-School's director Rajul Garg

1. Being India's first business school(Sunstone Business School) to launch open courses in management, what are your major challenges in terms of reaching out to those unreached groups of students in India, considering the volume of population and the ever growing thirst for knowledge?

Rajul: Reaching out is always a challenge, specially since it's a latent need. People are not looking for these kind of courses and do not expect that a good quality job can be done of teaching online. We are mainly banking on word of mouth for the popularity of these courses to spread.

2. Observing the trend on 'interest for online learning', how do you define your primary target audience, skewed to MOOC's online courses; in the context of smaller cities/towns in India?

Rajul: Our primary audience is still more skewed to the metros and working professionals. We get students from smaller cities but as a %age, its low. Availability of Internet, comfort with doing things on the Internet and also a deeper understanding of applicability of such learning narrows it down more to cities.

3. Assuming that all learning transactions are slowly but gradually moving towards the online sector, in terms of business and investment strategy; as Sunstone Business School, what are your plans (as MOOC) of scaling up the online enthusiasm with international standards, on behalf of Indian learners and educators(online faculty)?

Rajul: Our chosen sector is business education and we are essentially trying to re-imagine MBA. In the knowledge economy, the value of business skills is increasing but the value of MBA as a product is going down. Clearly there is a need for different products to emerge. We plan to continuously upgrade our quality if delivery and broaden our reach. We are keeping them free to be able to make them more accessible and overcome the hurdle of initial trust.

4. Give us a brief picture on the open course structure and fees.

Rajul: Our Open courses are free. We have then a spectrum from short term course of around Rs. 15,000 to a full Post Graduate Diploma for Rs. 2.6L.