The Online MBA Comes Of Age

FROM JUST PUTTING A CAMERA IN A CLASSROOM FOR LECTURE CAPTURE TO FULL ENGAGEMENT 

Just as crucial, cyber learning is no longer some clunky and ill-defined stepchild of the educational world. Instead, many business schools are employing production values, high-end videoconferencing technology and Internet simulations that keep students deeply engaged and on their toes. They go far beyond the early Internet courses first made available on dial-up modem connections. Those first generation efforts were not unlike the very first movies to come out of Hollywood. In early cinema, points out Cates of MBA@UNC, producers simply set up a camera in front of a stage to film a play. It wasn’t until the Great Train Robbery in 1903 that the technology of filmmaking was employed in innovative ways to show the true promise of movie making.

Similarly, in the vast majority of earlier courses, professors put a camera in a classroom to do lecture capture. “The message is, ‘There was a real class and I wasn’t there. So this is second best,’ adds Cates. “We’re using the technology to help us do the same things that we do in the face-to-face program: challenging class discussions, group projects, team consulting assignments, and simulations. In an MBA program, learning from your classmates is important. So is working in teams and learning how to effectively negotiate. Students should assume they should get these kinds of things in a good online program.”

So in live class sessions online, students often peer at computer screens with a Hollywood Squares-look, seeing their fellow students in tiny boxes with an animated professor orchestrating a discussion via an audio feed. Students can tap on a button to “raise their hands” to participate, generally by typing in a question or a response into a window on the screen. But there’s much more to it than that.

In the past six months, for example, Kenan-Flagler piloted its first live consulting project with a team of online students and a faculty advisor, a retired McKinsey & Co. partner. The group is working with a public corporation on a marketing project for a product. “They will be delivering the same kind of consulting project that our full-time MBAs would do,” says Cates. As part of another global business project, the school’s online students are working on virtual teams for a large multinational corporation with students from several other business schools. The project will culminate with two-week visits and presentations in Brazil, China and India.

At Carnegie Mellon, which will enroll its first online MBA class in August, the online students will partake in the same intensive leadership experiences, with workshops, seminars and one-on-one coaching, that were recently part of an update of the school’s full-time, on-campus MBA curriculum. Every student is given a four-hour assessment of their management capabilities that forms the basis of an “action plan” to build on a person’s strengths and minimize their weaknesses. The plan is customized for each individual who is then assigned an executive coach for the entire MBA program to “work on his or her leadership stuff.”

Michele Pfund, faculty director of W.P. Carey’s online MBA, says Arizona State’s internet-based program grooms students for an increasingly virtualized business world. “Students are learning how to lead virtually – this is an ever-present need in our current society,” she explains.  “When you’re working with people in the same building, you have trust, but you need to be able to make those same connections online.”  Pfund says online education is often construed as impersonal, but that new technology is turning the tables. “With the changes in technology there’s no reason for me not to know what my students’ faces look like,” she points out.  However, technology can also make it easier for less engaged students to hide, compared with full-time programs where peer pressure and face-to-face oversight are more in play.  

TOP ONLINE PROGRAMS REPORTING HIGHLY FAVORABLE OUTCOMES FOR THEIR STUDENTS

Increasingly, no less, schools that have been in the online space for several years are now reporting highly positive outcomes for their graduates. At Kelley, which allows online MBA students to sign up for the on-campus recruiter interview schedules available to its full-time students, the rewards have come in higher pay and upward mobility. Powell says Kelley Direct students who graduated in the past year ending June 30, 2012, began the program with average salaries of $76,750. When they graduated their pay was $104,160, an increase of 36%. Moreover, 66% of the students also earned a promotion by commencement.

Babson College says students who graduated in 2010 from its Fast Track MBA program averaged a 30% increase in pay by the time they left with their online degrees. “They certainly didn’t graduate during the flush years of the economy yet they were getting substantial increases in pay,” says Michael Cummings, faculty director of Fast Track. “They get promoted. They get great new jobs.”

At Kenan-Flagler, 30% of students in the online program for more than a year have gotten a promotion or had a job change internally or externally. One current student, says Cates, is a West Point graduate who started the MBA@UNC program as an attorney on the east coast and wanted to make a career change. “Within the first several months of the program, she was able to use what she was learning to get a job in operations with a consumer products company. She moved from the east coast to California and now she is moving to the company’s headquarters in Atlanta thanks to another promotion. Another student in our initial cohort has had two steps up in his company during the time he has been in the program. He attributes that very directly to taking what he has learned in class and incorporating the ideas at work. He is being recognized by the chief financial officer for bringing more strategic thinking to finance.”