Iversity enters professional education market

Berlin – iversity enters the corporate education market with the online course "Visual Thinking for Business – Make Your Point". The course is offered by the renowned German business school, WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management. In international league tables, WHU is regularly placed among the top-ranking institutions of its kind.

The course is primarily directed towards sales staff, creatives and managers, who will learn techniques to visualise complex information. "Visual Thinking for Business" gives participants the skills needed to convey arguments, business concepts and other ideas in a concise and engaging way through the use of sketching. A detailed overview of the course content can be viewed here.

iversity is ready to disrupt the corporate training market through digital means. This market is currently highly fragmented and served by providers of on-site training. In contrast, the “Visual Thinking” online course can be accessed at any time, from anywhere, and is significantly more affordable: Participation costs €399 ($445) per person. However, this is not just a simple online video collection. iversity's didactical approach is designed to trigger interaction and feedback between the learners, with a clear focus on conveying practical skills. This differentiates the iversity pedagogy from that of most other online learning platforms.

Hannes Klöpper, iversity’s CEO, explains how iversity’s course offering has evolved: “In the past two years, iversity has gained a wealth of experience in what it takes to provide a high-quality and captivating learning experience. We have developed an award-winning platform. We know how to conceptualise great courses and scale them for large numbers of participants. We are now applying this knowledge to extend our offering to professional training.” In collaboration with its partners – universities, business schools, as well as companies – iversity will create a range of high-quality online courses that focus on explicitly job-relevant skills.

Among the first participants are executives from German railway company Deutsche Bahn and airport operator Fraport AG. Course instructor, Prof. Christoph Hienerth, who holds the chair in Entrepreneurship and New Business Development at WHU, explains why this course is interesting to enterprises and individual professionals: "Business decisions require handling complex information. Even experienced staff can easily lose track. Companies increasingly use graphic representations of information in order to structure problems, develop solutions, and convince customers. At WHU, visualisation techniques are already an integral part of executive training."