The Future Of The MBA Is Happening Right Now At Indiana Kelley

Vaibhav Junnarkar works in product management for a software development company based in Georgia, in the United States. With a background in tech, Junnarkar tells P&Q he had been wanting to pursue an MBA for a long time to add business skills to his toolkit.

“I wanted to learn the business language,” he says. “And so I was looking for programs that are flexible and that would help me achieve my goals.”

But as he searched programs in 2018 and 2019, he realized that quitting his job and getting into a residential program was not an option. “I was looking for online options, but then people who I was talking with, they kept saying that the experience in the online program is not the same as in-residence programs,” he says. “And I did my research. I attended a lot of Kelley Direct webinars. And as a matter of fact, I also watched a lot of Poets&Quants videos on the Kelley Direct program.

“And so with that background, I knew for a fact that I was making a right decision, getting into an online MBA program with Kelley Direct.”

CAPSTONE COURSE: TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

It wasn’t until Junnarkar attended his first lecture that he was convinced he’d made the right choice. “I was just amazed how the school used the technology, how they organized all the course content, and how prepared the faculty was in an online environment,” he says. “That’s when I knew 100% that this was the right program for me.”

Greg Fisher, who has taught at the Kelley School for more than a decade, says Kelley Direct has created a new and better overall MBA experience by building three integrative experiences into the program — different from learning in strict disciplinary channels, as one would in a traditional full-time MBA. Of course, students learn “finance from the finance professor and accounting from the accounting professor and marketing from the marketing professor — we’ve got those building blocks,” the South Africa native says. “But really, I think the opportunity for MBA students and for MBA programs going forward is to say, ‘How do you be more integrative?’ Because when students step from the classroom or the online classroom into the real world, no one’s asking them to just think with the finance hat on, or to just think with the strategy hat on, or to just think with the marketing hat on. They’re having to tackle real-life problems with this very integrative mindset.”

The first of the three integrative experiences is Kelley On Campus, really a sort of “pre-integrative” experience, Fisher says, which happens early in the program and places students into teams to work on a live client project. “It’s going to be integrative,” he says, “but for the most part you haven’t built up most of those building blocks yet.” Next, in the second year of the program, is another in-residence experience, Kelley On Location, where students go to a city to experience a program that’s often related to that city and includes some key aspect to what they’re doing.

Finally, after students have completed their core classes and “all the fundamental building blocks,” comes the third integrative experience, the capstone course, which unlike the other two is not in-person but online. The course “is going to break down or integrate ideas and concepts from across the different classes that you’ve done in the core,” Fisher says, “so for the first time since you’ve learned all this core material, you’re going to be given a problem, which you’re going to have to jump from what you’ve learned in accounting, to what you’ve learned in marketing, to what you’ve learned in strategy and integrate and utilize and decide, number one, ‘What knowledge do I need?’ And secondly, ‘How am I going to apply that knowledge and those skills alongside the skills from the other classes?'”

THE VALUE OF TENSE — AND INTENSE — CASE DISCUSSION

The capstone course is four weeks and comes at a time when the students are, frankly, exhausted.

“We’ve got four weeks for this experience and the students have just finished the course, so they’re typically pretty tired, they’re pretty beat up, they’ve done a lot of work,” Fisher says. “So the first week is in fact just preparing them to really embrace the concept of case teaching in an online format.”

Fisher recalls from his own MBA at the University of Pretoria in South Africa nearly 20 years ago how integral the intense case discussions with other students were to the whole experience. That’s one of the things that online MBA programs struggle with, he says: “How do you get that tension? How do you hold students accountable? How do they disagree with each other? You’re seeing each other on a screen as opposed to having the emotions in the room. And so the drive here is to really say, let’s first prepare the students for what’s expected in a case study teaching environment and help them understand some of the rules and norms and nuances of how cases are used as a learning mechanism in an MBA program.”

That’s why week one of the capstone course entails understanding the purpose of cases, how they get used from a teaching standpoint, what the expectations of students are around preparing for cases, participating in them, and then reflecting on them. Across the remaining weeks, students engage in an intense case study discussion. “Because we’ve got a lot of students going through this process, we are investing a lot in preparing these case studies,” Fisher says. “We’re making sure they’re multidisciplinary and integrative and getting our best case teachers each to teach one of them. So for one week, one of our best case teachers, whether it’s the Dean Idie Kesner or myself, or Will Geoghegan or someone else, that’s all they’re going to worry about for that week. And they will run multiple classes focused on that case, in which students will come and join in an online environment, join the class, prepare intensely for that case, submit some material prior to the class, and then really engage in this case study discussion, a bit like you would in a Harvard Business School classroom, but in an online environment.”