NEW DELHI: Sunstone Business School, the leading specialized Management School, today announced the launch of India's first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). By pushing boundaries as an educational innovator, Sunstone Business School is bringing a paradigm shift by enabling the professionals aspiring to grow to receive the finest and continuous management education in India. Sunstone aims to offer free online courses across all management disciplines.

"The mindset of professionals today is changing - it's no more about getting a degree or a certificate, but about enhancing knowledge, and personality. However, there is a dearth of quality courses that allow professionals to up skill or cross skill along with managing professional and family lives. We saw a huge need for quality online courses delivered by taking real world problems and imparting concepts in the course of solving them. We have already seen huge success of MOOC in US such as Coursera, edX, Udacity with millions of students enrolled so far. The MOOC is our effort in bridging this gap by opening up the knowledge for larger community and building a continuous and a flexible learning environment in India. These courses aim to equip professionals with relevant tools and concepts to advance their careers, learn from the best in the business and develop a higher level of personal confidence," said Mr. Rajul Garg, Director, Sunstone Business School.

Sunstone started delivering its courses since December 2012 and did a soft launch with a 3-week course on Negotiations. More than 1,000 students have applied so far for the course from all across India as well as internationally. Students are able to earn academic certificate as credentials for completing courses. Now, Sunstone is launching its next course on Entrepreneurship in January 2013 and is already seeing a huge interest in enrollment.

Sunstone Business School Open Courses is the only MOOC delivering courses using problem based learning approach unlike others that rely on the traditional lecture-centric approach. The key to delivery of the MOOC is the learning management system and the various pedagogical elements such as videos, webinars, simulation exercises, situation analysis, and discussions. Sunstone Open Courses are unique as it continues to leverage technology and still provide peer-to-peer exchanges with a prominent focus on "do it yourself" philosophy. "When a student joins one of the courses, he/she also joins a community of thousands of participants with diverse experience that enables students to further learn and network with the peer group. In India, the concept of MOOC is very new and we believe it will bring a long lasting paradigm shift in management education in India," said Ms. Megha Khatri, Program Manager for Open Courses at Sunstone Business School.

About Sunstone Business School

Sunstone Business School (www.sunstone.in) is the leading specialized Management School for high quality working professionals in the IT/ITES industry. Sunstone's one year Post Graduate Program in Management has gained recognition as a premier program accepted by the industry globally. The school's problem based pedagogy offers students a robust grounding in business strategies and implementation.

To know more about the MOOC, please write to opencourses@sunstone.in or visit: http://sunstone.in/management-program/open-courses/ 

Primary Media Contact: Dinesh Singh, dinesh@sunstone.in, 91-9871743222

Secondary Media Contact: Megha Khatri, megha.khatri@sunstone.in, 91-8800393805