Ducere to offer online business degrees in UK

Ducere Global Business School will expand into Britain this year offering online undergraduate business degrees.

Ducere executive director Mat Jacobson: ‘Online undergraduate learning … works much better for more mature students’.

Australian educator Ducere Global Business School will expand into Britain this year offering online undergraduate business degrees, seeking to take advantage of that country’s underdeveloped online higher education market.

Ducere has partnered with the University of Wales Trinity St David to launch a selection of bachelor degrees in applied business in which students can follow one of three pathways: management, marketing or entrepreneurship.

Ducere executive director Mat Jacobson said that even though the British higher education market was far bigger than Australia’s it still was relatively undeveloped in online learning, aside from one well-known specialist institution, the Open University.

“So there’s a lot of growth opportunity for online degrees in the UK market,” he said.

Mr Jacobson plans to start by delivering online business degrees in Britain and later use it as a springboard to enter the large US market. That would be the next phase, he said.

He said he believed online bachelor of business degrees would be popular in Britain with older students who already were in the workforce, as in Australia.

“Online undergraduate learning typically doesn’t work very successfully for school-leavers, it works much better for more mature students,” he said.

He said the combination of online flexibility and the applied learning approach followed by Ducere, which emphasised practical applied learning and real-life assignments in conjunction with business, would appeal to older students.

Mr Jacobson said it was “like an apprenticeship model where you go back and forth between theory and practice”.

He said students would have to interact with many businesses, and their projects needed to meet both academic standards and business needs.

“When a student is doing an assignment they have to be marked off by an academic. But that’s only one part,” he said. “They also have to present to industry on their findings. They have to meet the requirements of industry.

“You have to, as a student, be able to learn the theory and apply it in a meaningful way into business.”

University of Wales Trinity St David vice-chancellor Medwin Hughes said the partnership with Ducere to offer the new applied business degrees was “an excellent example of the way in which we are redefining our offer to ensure that students are able to access higher education regardless of where they are in the world”.

The university, which was founded in 1822, is the oldest in England and Wales after Oxford and Cambridge.

This year it was ranked seventh in the UK for academic experience in the Times Higher Education student experience survey.

Mr Jacobson said the applied business degrees were the normal three-year length for undergraduate degrees but students could accelerate them to two years. He said one advantage of that was students would pay for two years’ tuition rather than three.

Ducere offers an MBA, a graduate certificate in business administration and bachelor of business degrees in partnership with the University of Canberra, all of which emphasise applied learning.