Executive education your clients come back for.
Potentially adds a programme layer on top of Canvas and Blackboard, for the part of your school that sells to employers. Corporate clients open a live portal on their own people. Sponsored executives see one clear view of the programme they are on. Your team runs the whole operation from the same place.
Here for the degree portfolio — undergraduate, MSc, MBA, DBA? Start on Business Schools.
Executive education has additional needs.
It runs in the same school, and it can run on the same platform as your degrees. It also asks for a few things a three-year degree never does.
Six weeks for one client, then a different six for the next. Designed quickly, delivered once, reassembled when the client comes back.
Mid-career, time-poor, accountable to whoever paid for the place, and usually without an institutional account.
The sponsor signing the invoice wants to see that their people changed. Attendance and a satisfaction score do not answer that.
A revenue line the school depends on, and, above the threshold, non-degree provision that AACSB reviews under Standard 5.
None of it calls for a second platform alongside the one your degrees already use. It calls for that platform to understand the programme itself.
One place to run the whole portfolio.
Not a reporting layer bolted to the side. The system your executive education runs on, sitting on top of the courses you already teach in Canvas or Blackboard.
Courses from your virtual learning environment, gathered into a programme with its own structure, cohorts, analytics and record.
Synchronised from the LMS, or enrolled by hand. Magic links and access lists for participants without an institutional account.
A space for every employer you work with, permissioned to their own people, open whenever they want it.
Pre-assessment against post-assessment, held and compared per participant, per course and per cohort.
Your framework and levels, mapped to the courses that develop them. Badges issued on completion. A profile the participant keeps.
Completion logic, reminders, credential issue, announcement routing and satisfaction scoring, running without anyone pressing anything.
- Every programme in one viewOpen programmes, custom work for a single client, and microcredentials that stack towards a degree.
- Each with its own cohorts and recordLive cohorts, next intake, participant count and completion, current at the moment you open it.
Illustration 01. Illustrative. Three kinds of programme, one place to run them.
A portal for every client, showing only their own people.
Custom and open programmes both live or die on the corporate relationship. This is the part of the platform that relationship actually touches.
Create a client organisation, add their administrators, attach the programmes and cohorts they run with you. They land on a dashboard covering every programme, with their members listed and every figure current at the moment they open it.
What a sponsor can see. Enrolment and completion, pass rates, grade distribution, learning gain, satisfaction and net promoter score for their cohorts, and trend lines across every intake they have sent you. Then down to the individual: courses taken, grades earned, gain made, skills developed with the evidence behind each, and the credentials they now hold. What each sponsor can see is set by the contract between your school and the employer, so it can be spelled out to participants when they enrol.
What they cannot. Anyone else. Participants from other employers in the same cohort, other clients, other programmes, and your institutional data are all outside their boundary. The permission is structural, set when the space is created, and it is not a report filter.
- One dashboard per clientEvery programme they run with you, their own people listed, every figure current at the moment they open it.
- What they seeEnrolment, completion, learning gain, net promoter score, and the trend across every intake — then down to each individual.
- What they cannotAnyone else. Other employers in the same cohort are outside the boundary, structurally.
Illustration 02. Illustrative. What a sponsor opens, and the boundary they cannot see past.
A programme sponsor opening the portal on her own cohort.
One clear view, for people who are not students.
A sponsored executive is not going to learn your virtual learning environment. They open one branded workspace with the programme in teaching order, their progress, the next deadline, and every announcement from every course in a single feed.
One calendar holds live sessions, cohort events and deadlines, with Outlook synchronisation. A cohort forum is there for questions, and for the thing sponsors most want to hear about — how the learning is being applied back at work.
Access without an account. Magic links, access lists and multi-factor authentication for people outside the institution. Arabic and right-to-left interface where you need it.
Something to keep. Badges at course, module and programme level, issued the moment the requirement is met. A skills profile showing what they can now do and the work behind each claim, in a public profile they control and can link from LinkedIn — still theirs long after their access to your systems ends.
A cohort mid-session. Every one of them opens the same view of the programme.
Cohorts, calendars and credentials, without the spreadsheet.
Executive education teams — corporate development, as a growing number of schools now call them — are small, and the programmes are short. Most of what follows is currently done by somebody with a spreadsheet and a calendar reminder.
Programmes build themselves. Courses, structure and enrolments come through from Canvas or Blackboard and assemble into a programme. Nobody rekeys a cohort.
Completion decides itself. Set what counts as done at task, course, module and programme level, and the platform judges it. Reminders chase incomplete work and approaching deadlines. Credentials issue on the moment. Survey data comes through and net promoter score is computed by course and by cohort.
Analytics from the portfolio down to one person. Programme, module and course. Cohort comparison, completion, drop-off, grade distribution, satisfaction beside the learning data, and the full activity timeline for any individual. Any table exports.
A map for the first client question. Because skills sit at course level and the programme sits above the courses, the map of what a programme develops assembles itself. Use it to design against a client’s capability gaps and to show a sponsor what they are buying before they sign.
- Capabilities down the sideStrategic thinking, financial judgement, leading change, data literacy, stakeholder influence.
- The level the programme reachesFilled to the level built, with the courses that build it named underneath.
- Assembled, not maintainedDrawn from what is actually taught and assessed, so it is current when the client asks.
Illustration 03. Illustrative. The map a client sees before they sign.
- Course completedIn Canvas or Blackboard, where it was taught.
- Two seconds laterThe completion rule has fired, the credential has issued, the skills profile has updated, and the sponsor portal is already current.
- No staff stepThe sponsor portal was current before anyone could have started a report.
Illustration 04. What happens between a participant finishing a course and their employer seeing it.
A grade says a course was passed. A gain says somebody improved.
Where a programme runs a pre-assessment and a post-assessment, both are held, the difference is calculated, and the gain is shown per participant, per course and per cohort. Distribution curves place an individual against their cohort. Trend lines show whether cohort five is outperforming cohort two.
It is the number every sponsor asks for, and the one a completion certificate cannot give them.
Capability leaves with the participant. Skills are mapped across the programme, each linked to the course and the work that evidences it, and carried in a profile the participant keeps.
Which answers the question a completion never could: what can this finance director now do that they could not do in September?
- Pre-assessment, week 0Most of the cohort at proficient.
- Post-assessment, week 12The whole distribution shifted towards advanced, with the gain calculated per participant, per course and per cohort.
- Cohort against cohortCohort 4 moved 1.3 levels on average; cohort 2 moved 0.7.
Illustration 05. Illustrative. The distribution before, the distribution after, and one person inside it.
The evidence you are judged on, already in the system.
Two external scrutinies shape this business, and neither is satisfied by attendance data.
The FT custom ranking is decided by your clients. Most of the score comes from client evaluations rather than from what you submit, and the heaviest categories are new skills and learning, and aims achieved. Those are questions a client answers well only if they have seen the evidence. A sponsor who has watched skills and gain accumulate in their own portal all year answers differently from one who received a slide pack in March.
AACSB asks for competency, not satisfaction. Standard 5.4 expects non-degree executive education above five percent of annual revenue to carry processes for quality and continuous improvement, and 5.3 extends that to stackable microcredentials feeding a degree. Skills mapped to the courses that build them, pre-assessment against post-assessment, and a credential record with evidence behind it are direct measures against competency goals.
Canvas and Blackboard, side by side, one experience.
Few schools run one environment across the whole portfolio, and executive education often runs somewhere else again. Your virtual learning environments stay the system of record for teaching. We embed through LTI 1.3 and read what is already there.
Deepest integration. Courses, assignments, submissions, grades, events and enrolments all flow through.
Embedded pathways, portfolio and skills profiles. Extended analytics in development.
Participant experience, pathways, skills profiles and credentials work across all four today. Aggregated analytics across two environments in a single view is in development.
One programme, one client, one cohort.
Deliberately contained. Prove the whole loop on something real before anything scales across the portfolio.
Scope the programme
Your pathway, your measures and your three audiences, mapped against what the LMS already holds.
Connect the systems
Canvas or Blackboard, survey tool, video conferencing, calendars and identity, including access for participants without institutional accounts.
Build the three views
Participant workspace, programme analytics and the client portal, on your real data rather than a demonstration tenant.
Run it with a live cohort
Real participants, real deadlines, real survey responses, so every figure can be checked against its source.
Open it to the client
Give one sponsor their portal and find out what they ask for next. That conversation shapes the rollout.
See it on your own programme.
Thirty minutes, live. All three views, on a real cohort rather than a demonstration tenant. Bring whichever colleague usually asks the hard question.
Here for the degree side of the school? The Business Schools page covers skills evidence, portfolios and experiential learning across undergraduate, MSc, MBA and DBA.