About eCornell
eCornell, Cornell University’s external education unit, provides online professional and executive development to students around the world. We offer 100+ award-winning professional certificate programs in a wide variety of disciplines:
Ivy League Curricula & Top-Ranked Faculty
eCornell courses are all developed by Cornell University faculty, and often include practical insights from other industry experts. All eCornell course content comes from top-rated programs with proven curricula.
Expert Led with Structured Flexibility
eCornell courses are online and expert led with structured flexibility. Courses are facilitated by subject-matter experts, who guide you, challenge you, and help you apply the course concepts to your real-world, on-the-job circumstances. Courses are designed to accommodate the schedules of busy professionals, so they are available around the clock and completely asynchronous. This means that once you begin your course, there is no appointed time or day that you must be online. You determine the schedule that’s right for you.
Start and End Dates Drive Completion
eCornell courses have defined start dates and end dates. A critical part of self-directed learning is to have a finish line. Most eCornell courses take about six to eight hours to complete, over a two-week period. About 90% of students finish their courses, a completion rate that leads the industry.
Interaction & Collaboration
As an eCornell student, you are never alone in your course. You are part of a cohort of 20 to 30 learners from organizations and industries around the world. Required discussions play an important part in your course, giving you and your classmates the opportunity to share and exchange your own experiences, best practices, perspectives, and examples. All this shared learning is facilitated by an instructor who brings both subject-matter expertise and real-world experience. Your interaction with peers from different organizations, and backgrounds fosters collaboration, networking, and a lot of practical, shared learning.
Emphasis on Practice and Application
The ability for you to interact with expert instructors, to ask questions and receive answers, and to learn with—and from—other participants keeps the learning interesting, practical, and above all, relevant to your work. And there’s one more key component: the practice opportunities. Most eCornell courses include a project, which challenges you to apply the course concepts to your own organization. Others include interactive scenarios, simulations, and other engaging practice activities. All courses include tools, techniques, or job aids that you can put to immediate use in your work.
We develop every certificate program and course with very tangible outcomes in mind. To us, it’s not enough if a course helps you to know something, or even to understand it. We design our programs to go much further, to equip you to do something—better or for the first time—at your job. We ask, “after completing this course, what will participants be able to analyze, identify, assess, implement, calculate, or influence that they couldn’t before?” eCornell courses draw on a variety of components to provide this practical learning:
- discussions
- projects
- practice activities
- short videos
- interviews with industry experts
- online tools and downloadable resources
- case studies and examples
- the guidance of an instructor
Our approach positions you as an active participant in the learning process, allowing you to build the necessary problem-solving skills at your own pace and in your own style to confront the real challenges you face on the job and in life.