Proceedings of EMOOCs 2017: Work in Progress Papers of the Experience and Research Tracks and Position Papers of the Policy Track 40 Designing SPOCs for student engagement – experiences from Management Education Karina Piersig 1 , Marc Egloffstein 2 , Martina Pumpat 1 , Andreas Eckhardt 1 , David Wagner 1 1 German Graduate School of Management and Law, Heilbronn, Germany {karina.piersig | andreas.eckhardt | david.wagner@ggs.de} pumpatmartina@web.de 2 Mannheim Business School, Mannheim, Germany egloffstein@mannheim-business-school.com Abstract. This paper reports the experiences from the implementation of a Small Private Online Course in Management Education which has been de- signed to support learner engagement and promote digital competency. We de- scribe the instructional design in detail, present some exploratory findings from a mixed-methods course evaluation and reflect on the lessons learned. Keywords: SPOC, Management Education, student engagement 1 Introduction Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become an important factor in the delivery of business education [1]. They are associated with flexible, scalable and measurable knowledge transfer for lifelong learning, both in academia and profes- sional development [2] However, completion rates are unsatisfactory and the ques- tionable instructional quality of MOOCs has been identified as one major reason for this [3]. As modern business education calls for learner activation and the application of models and procedures to practical problems (e.g. case based teaching), adequate online courses must be designed accordingly. Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs) have evolved from traditional MOOC concepts to address this target [4]. SPOCs usu- ally follow the xMOOC model, but only for a limited group of participants. This al- lows for a better instructor support as well as peer interaction and collaborative prob- lem-solving. The underlying question is: how can SPOCs in management education be designed to promote learner engagement? In this paper, we describe the instruc- tional design (ID) of such a SPOC, present some findings from the exploratory course evaluation and reflect on the lessons learned and further steps to take. By conducting an ongoing iterative process of developing, testing, implementing, evaluating and redesigning the course, we follow a design-based research approach [5].