Alliance Manchester Business School has recently launched a ‘Managing Responsibly: Practicing Responsibility, Sustainability, Ethic’ MOOC.

MOOCs are university-level courses without the need to complete an entire programme of studies, and are becoming increasingly popular. They offer a large number of students the opportunity to study high quality courses online with prestigious universities for free.

This course is aimed at foundation level, pre-degree, or for people from other disciplines or functions (e.g. engineering) who wish to move into a generic management role, integrating questions of corporate social responsibility, sustainability and individual & professional ethics.

The developers of the course are hoping for international reach, in particular reaching out to people who don’t have access to other routes to higher education for various financial or access reasons.

Early indications from pre-enrolment interest suggests that over half of those who have expressed interest pre-enrolment in the MOOC come from African Nations, with a few others from USA, and SE Asia. Several appear to be from small businesses or consultancies.

One of the strengths of this particular MOOC is the recording of practitioner interviews – these are used through the six sessions/weeks. In the final session they filmed delivering a ‘lecture’ session and a three-way conversation between the developers where they use practitioner interviews to draw out and discuss a series of cross-cutting themes and messages from the MOOC.

The course is free and further information and enrollment details can be found on the website.