Tuck Launches Dartmouth's First EdX Certificate Program

This week, Tuck School of Business launched the first Dartmouth professional certificate program in partnership with online platform, edX. The program, Retail and Omnichannel Management, is designed like edX's other professional certificate programs for learners to "develop the critical skills needed for today's top jobs through a series of in-demand courses." Courses in the series include Retail Fundamentals and Omnichannel Strategy and Management, and are taught by Santiago Gallino, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the Tuck School, and Antonio Morena-Garcia, Associate Professor of Operations at the Kellogg School of Management.

"This is an example of the new types of learning experiences being offered online," says Instructional Desinger and DartmouthX project lead Mike Goudzwaard, a partner in developing the Tuck certificate program. "Many early MOOCs (massive open online courses) were adapted from traditional residential courses, but now MOOCs are being offered in variety of ways, and for many different purposes. This allows learners to tailor their experiences to their own unique goals."

Among the emerging trends in digital learning, Goudzwaard cites courses addressing current events and timely topics, such as the University of Michigan's Teach Out Series and Davidson College's pop-up courses, and courses and program aimed at developing specific job skills, like Tuck's retail management offerings. Some even provide advanced standing for students entering Masters degree programs through the EdX Micromasters model. The emergence of a Tuck certificate program follows on Dartmouth's initial success in offering courses throguh edX. To date, DartmouthX has offered five online courses registering more than 91,000 learners. Of these, 15% (roughly twice the MOOC average) have sustained deep engagement with the course throughout its run.

For Professor Gallino, offering a certificate program through edX is an opportunity to add to a limited body of educational offerings on the topic of retail. Through the program, Gallino and colleague Morena-Garcia can provide high-quality instruction and resources to learners, while also offering a guided sequence from one course to the next. In a world of seemingly unlimited online course offerings (more than 1,400 courses available at this moment from EdX alone), this guidance can be invaluable to learners interested in meeting personal and professional goals.

Tuck's Retail and Omnichannel Management certificate program begins May 10. Other upcoming DartmouthX courses include Bipedalism: The Evolution of Upright Walking, Free Will, Attention, Top-Down Causation, and Consciousness in the Brain, John Milton's Paradise Lost, Materials in Gear, and Complementary and Alternative Medicine.  Learn more!