My MBA experience with Smartly

When I transitioned from Product development to Product Management I sort of was worried about "not knowing what I need to know and not being able to cover that gap". Usually that feeling is always there when you start a new project, learn a new domain in unfamiliar territory and it fades away as I read and dig more into the relevant domain/project. Before this whenever I had thought of going back to school..I always had research in my mind but this time I was wondering if MBA is what I should be looking at. Long story short...my Quest for an MBA lead me to explore many options

• In -person take a break to do MBA 
• In-person executive MBA
• Partially online, partially in-person MBA
• Mostly online MBA
• completely online MBA

Here are the few that stood out in my list ( based on my constraints (read costs and location), interests and availability)

• https://www.coursera.org/university-programs/imba
• http://jindal.utdallas.edu/executive-education/emba-programs/emba/  
• https://smart.ly/

For the convenience of pricing(free until in Beta) , location (online) and my weakness for trying out new stuff ( read technology) I decide to go with Smartly.

Here are the key highlights

• This has to be the first MOOC that I completed till the end (believe me I have signed up for many MOOCs including the first MOOC offered by stanford on machine learning but never went beyond 3/4 weeks)
• I like the bite-size approach they give to lessons
• You can not doze off during the lesson ..since you learn by answering ( it is pretty interactive in that sense) 
• I covered a wide variety of topics I had not come across during my product development experience  
• The assessments at the end of the chapter .. gave me a good estimate of how well I understand the subject
• The Exam (mid-year, end of year) gave me a good reason to brush up on everything at once and gave a really "back to school" feeling
• The discussions, debates on topics related to lessons ..helped understand the topic in real life context .. it was basically like combining current news, current trends to education .. pretty effective
• Smartly is licensed by the Washington DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education Higher Education Licensure Commission. This means that Smartly confers a licensed MBA degree. So if you motivation was learning .. its a good place to get started .. but I want to remind you it's not an accredited degree  (so not sure how it stacks up to other MBA ..but the motivation of MOOCs is learning rather than credit in most of the cases) 
• Though I was never able to participate in study groups .. but they do have that option
• The schedule does give you a little bit of flexibility .. so that if you miss some lessons in a week or 2 because you got busy in office or got sick or are out of town .. so it was nice to be able to catch up and work with that flexibility ..but trust me ,, if you fall too behind it will get hard to catch up .. so try to stay on top of the schedule if you can
• Overall I totally enjoyed learning with Smartly. I thank them for making their material accessible to me for free and giving me this opportunity (since they are in Beta and apparently they do have a selection criteria for the Beta students .. not sure how true that claim is .. will only find out if somebody was rejected for smartly MBA application .. yes I did apply for the smartly MBA and was selected) 

Note:- this review is not solicited by Smartly and I am not getting any favors from them ( I write this after I pass the smartly MBA ;)) .. I just got a couple of queries on linkedin to share my Smartly MBA experience so thought of just generally sharing it with everybody .. in case anybody is on the same pathways .. looking for something similar