Japan's Globis U launches online MBA courses in China

Japan's leading MBA course provider Globis University sees China's dynamic digital landscape to be the springboard for its expansion in the country, according to its president Yoshito Hori.

Partnering with local online portals from knowledge-sharing site Zhihu to online course aggregator YXT, Globis University has started offering two to three business management courses online with 150 audiobooks and multiple videos per class.

"Responses are quite warm from our users via both platforms, with Zhihu asking for more courses to be uploaded on its site," said Hori. He believed the approach is expected to drive the share of revenue in China from the current 10 percent to 25 percent ideally by 2025.

"Technology, smartphone (applications) and the internet are strong in China. You have to be here to be able to learn of what is going on," he noted.

Founded in 2006, Globis provides both MBA courses and corporate training classes in its home country of Japan. In China, it has 300 corporate clients, 40 percent of which are Chinese companies.

Globis is harnessing artificial intelligence to ride the future education wave, which Hori believed is set to transform from face-to-face teaching to subscription-based online learning modules that enable people to study anytime, anywhere.

Hori said China and its leading tech companies serve as a source of inspiration for such innovation: "I was quite impressed by Tencent's Fine Art team that adopts AI to play the game of Go. They only started two years ago."

"Management and the game of Go have a lot in common," he said. Tencent as a gaming company can leverage AI to play Go. We should also think of using AI on the education side."