Considering An Online MBA?

 

If so, you need to look at Indiana University’s Kelley Direct program. Ranked first in the world by Poets&Quants this year, Kelley Direct was also Poets&Quants’ MBA Program of the Year for 2020.

Why? Because new innovations in this online MBA from the Kelley School of Business have made it the standard reference in online degree programs.

In this mini-documentary sponsored by Kelley, Poets&Quants Founder John A. Byrne brings viewers through a guided tour of what makes this highly affordable program a standout. Meet the deans, faculty, students and alumni who speak candidly about their direct experience with the program and how it will accelerate your professional life.

Kelley was a pioneer in online learning, launching its long-distance MBA nearly a quarter of a century ago in 1999. Yet, the latest version of Kelley Direct is among the most up-to-date online learning experiences in the world. The newly reimagined online MBA creates the flexibility and options more common to full-time residential programs. The innovations make Kelley’s online offering the closest any student can possibly come to a full MBA experience, without the need to quit one’s job and be on campus for all of the classes.

Many online MBA programs feature canned video lectures with no live Internet classes. Some are taught by adjunct faculty and teaching assistants in classes that are not limited in size. The choice of electives or specialization is limited if they exist at all. Most often there are no in-residence sessions, no chance to visit campus to meet classmates and faculty face-to-face. Student clubs and organizations, a central feature of a full MBA experience, are not funded by the school. Global immersion trips are not an option. And while career support is often promised, it is seldom delivered in any meaningful way. If career coaching is available, it does not approach the kind of hand-holding that occurs in a full-time residential program.

None of that is true with Kelley Direct. The core of the school’s differentiation is its newly updated curriculum that allows online students to customize the program to their own career aspirations. The school doubled the number of electives that students can take, 24 credit hours from a dozen before so that fully half the program is given over to student choice, an innovative format that allows MBA candidates to dive deep into any one of seven majors, from business analytics and digital technology management to finance and marketing. Each of those majors averages ten elective courses, not just a slim handful. Kelley Direct also boasts a signature integrated core curriculum experience, similar to the integrative core in its highly ranked full-time residential MBA.

All of the online courses feature live class sessions on a weekly basis taught by professors who teach in the school’s in-residence programs, a significant departure from many rival options in which faculty pre-record their lectures. Every live class averages just 30 students so engagement and interaction is high. And then there are the pair of required in-person experiences dubbed Kelley Connect Weeks on the Bloomington, Indiana, campus built into the beginning and end of the Kelley Direct Online MBA program. Faculty create case studies specifically for these sessions and teams of online students present before executives who are protagonists in those cases.

Watch and experience all of these features in this mini-documentary.