The social network that started for college students has now become the classroom.  That’s right, you can now earn your MBA on Facebook.

The London School of Business and Finance (LSBF) is the first and currently only school offering an MBA via a Facebook application. In this case, it is their Global MBA.  In the app, you can take courses in corporate finance, accounting, ethics, marketing and strategic planning.  In addition to its Facebook and online MBA programs, LSBF also offers on-campus degrees in finance, marketing, management and business law, available both part-time and full-time.

As you may expect, the courses are essentially an extension of the online MBA that LSBF already offers with an important difference — taking the courses through Facebook is free.

Anyone who is on Facebook can use the app and take LSBF’s classes, learn the subjects and apply the knowledge to their work.  Amazingly enough, this even includes classroom participation, according to an article in the New York Times that says, “Students who like what they see will be able to watch video lectures, participate in online peer-to-peer study sessions and track their progress through interactive tests - all without charge.” To earn a degree, students must take accredited tests at which point the free ride ends and payment begins.

What I find more amazing isn’t that it’s online or even that it is on Facebook, LSBF is the first school to allow you to essentially audit their classes without cost and it is open to the world.  The sharing of lectures and class materials online has been around for years, particularly under OpenCourseware which allows schools to opensource their lectures and allow anyone to study videos and classroom lectures such as Foundations of Software Engineering from MIT and Game Theory from Yale. Those offerings are just two of many classes and institutions offered, see a full list here.

With OpenCourseware, you can only review a class. Certainly the opportunity to learn software programming from a renowned computer science professor isn’t a trivial matter, but connecting the free online class to an actual degree isn’t a step that has been made, until last month.

I’m not an expert on higher education, but I think we are in the first stages of serious change happening for colleges as technology continues to allow them to innovate the way they teach and reach students. Will we see a Facebook-only college? Only time will tell, but I think technology like Facebook will allow universities to refine their educational model, and that is a good thing.