2013 may well become known as the year of the massive open online course, commonly abbreviated MOOC, as more and more prestigious business schools began offering their courses for free to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

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Stanford Graduate School of Business, University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, Michigan's Ross School of Business and Spain's IE Business School are just a few of the top MBA programs bringing their courses to the people, and it seems more are joining the party every month.

Most elite schools use the Palo Alto-based education company Coursera to host their MOOC content. While universities don't offer official credit for their MOOCs, some offer participants a certificate - either free or for a fee - confirming completion of the course and a demonstrated understanding of the material.

In the fall, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Harvard Business School and HEC Paris announced they will offer numerous MOOCs as a way to enhance the academic experience and allow teaching to go beyond the confines of the classroom. HEC Paris is the first business school in France to launch a MOOC and will offer two courses, European law and corporate finance, in early spring 2014.

When announcing the news, HEC Dean Bernard Ramanantsoa said, "This partnership with Coursera offers HEC an opportunity to open up our courses to people who might not usually have access to higher education, whether for practical or economic considerations. Sharing our faculty's expertise with the general public at no cost is a truly exciting and meaningful challenge."

Meanwhile, with the Wharton MBA Foundation Series, faculty teach four core classes in financial accounting, operations management, marketing and corporate finance, allowing students all over the world to learn the same material a first-year Wharton MBA student would.

"This is the first time that a business school has bundled a collection of MOOCs together in this fashion," Don Huesman, managing director of the innovation group at Wharton, told Bloomberg Businessweek in September. "We're taking our core required classes in the MBA program, with the same instructors, to provide those same core concepts."

Harvard Business School is playing it close to the vest with its initial foray into online education, perhaps because it must consider how to impart its knowledge to the masses without tarnishing the school's venerable brand.

Brian C. Kenny, chief marketing and communications officer for HBS, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the school needs to figure out how to translate its signature pedagogical technique, the case method, to an online educational experience.

"Whether or not the case method can work online," said Kenny, "is a question that we haven't answered yet."

For its part, Darden has upcoming courses in foundations of business strategy, smart growth for private businesses, design thinking for business innovation and new models of business in society. Darden's Dean Bob Bruner remarked in an interview that the school is proud to be one of the most active schools in online learning.

"Everyone says 'you're a business school, why are you giving it away for free,'" Bruner said, but he explains that "MOOCs are consistent with our mission and we're learning a great deal about digital instruction with practice."

These online courses may also be one of the best marketing tools the schools have at their fingertips. As Bruner noted, MOOCs are "helping a part of the world to learn about Darden, a population that was pretty much oblivious to the existence of the school beforehand."

For MBA applicants wondering whether to enroll in a MOOC at one of their target schools, I say go for it. There's no harm in getting an early taste of the course work to come, and the experience might actually help inform your decision to apply or allow you to reference something concrete about the curriculum in your essays.

The courses typically require a high level of motivation to complete, and doing so shows a commitment to self-improvement the admissions committee would find laudable.

Just don't make the mistake of thinking that completing a set of MOOCs from Wharton will put you in the same league as a student on campus. The conversations that occur in class and out, and the networking opportunities business school provides, remain the most valuable aspects of the MBA experience.

No one is exactly sure yet how free online courses factor into the world of students, nonstudents and applicants. Does it merely offer a taste of the school, or will it one day replace live classes? Right now, this kind of online learning is still in its infancy, but it is a very real part of the education world and good to experiment with rather than ignore.

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