Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/499026
66 BizEd MAY | JUNE 2015 ideas in action ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL MORGENSTERN Offering More Online THE WHARTON SCHOOL OF the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia will oer a Business Foundations Specialization series through Coursera, combining the school's four-course foundation series with a capstone project that allows participants to apply their knowledge to real-world business problems. Participants who complete all the required courses will receive a Coursera Verified Cer- tificate. Wharton has lined up partnerships with online marketplace Snapdeal and music identifier Shazam to provide project topics for the capstone courses. Wharton will invite the top 50 perform- ers every year to apply to one of its graduate business programs,¦and it will waive the application fee. Wharton also will oer up to five US$20,000 scholarships to top-perform- ing students who have completed the special- ization and are admitted to its MBA program. According to dean Geo Garrett, one of the key goals of the program is to "identify talent from a pool of participants who might not have considered business education before." FIELD NOTES The Kindle Textbook Creator, which allows educators and authors to design and publish their own e-textbooks and other education- al content, is now available from online retailer Amazon.com. The tool allows educators to turn PDFs of their course materials into Kindle books and upload them to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing website, where the public can access and purchase the content. Compatible with Apple, Android, or Microsoft devices, the texts support high- lighting, notation, bookmarking, and flashcard creation, and give students access to dictionary and Wikipedia information. Authors can earn royalties, while maintaining the rights to their content. Visit kdp. amazon.com/edu. IMD of Lausanne, Switzerland, has launched the IMD Global Leader Index (GLI), a free online platform that allows users to compare their capabilities to those of their peers in four areas: strategic leadership, execution leadership, stakeholder leadership, and personal leadership. The GLI then helps them identify areas for improvement. The tool is based on methodology developed by Dan Denison and Robert Hooijberg, professors of organizational behav- ior and leadership at IMD. Visit www. imd.org/gli. The CIEE: Council on Interna- tional Educational Exchange has released an action paper that compiles 71 expert-generated ideas for increasing student participation in study abroad opportunities. Ideas range from o•ering more econom- ical housing alternatives to using technology to allow students to take required courses on their home campuses while they are studying abroad. The paper supports the In- stitute of International Education's 2014 Generation Study Abroad initiative, which aims to double the number of U.S. students who study overseas to 600,000 by the year 2020. The paper "Answering the Generation Study Abroad Chal- lenge" can be found at www.ciee. org/global-education-conference/ images/email/CIEE_Conference%20 WP2_022015.pdf. MakerBot, a 3-D printing company, recently opened a MakerBot Inno- vation Center at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. The multidis- ciplinary center is equipped with 31 MakerBot Replicator printers, a supply of filament, desktop 3-D scanners, and a proprietary 3-D printing software platform that links all the printers together, al- lowing for remote access, paywalls, print queuing, and mass production. The university pays for the equip- ment, while MakerBot provides consulting, technical support, and training. The company also will help faculty develop a curriculum that supports entrepreneurship and quick prototyping. Since it began working directly with universities last year, MakerBot has helped set up large-scale printing centers at three other higher education insti- tutions, each with more than 30 3-D printers. These include State Uni- versity of New York at New Paltz; the College of the Ouachitas in Malvern, Arkansas; and Florida Polytechnic University in Polk City. Visit www. makerbot.com/innovation-center.