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

Concept integration intensifies in the third week of the Kelley Direct capstone course. Students are responsible for integrating a merger acquisition, “and so you get the cultural issues, you get the economic synergies, you get all of that,” Greg Fisher says. “And so we’re purposefully designing it around a smaller organization where they’re at the helm, a larger organization where they’re somewhere near the helm, and a large organization where they’re having to manage things up and down the organization. So that will then give them this opportunity to really integrate their knowledge and understanding in a meaningful way.”

The schedule of classes itself is intense, Fisher says, with two or three classes each week on a Saturday, “and they can just choose to attend one of these. Then two or three each evening on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, they’ll choose to attend one, participate intensely in that case discussion. And then on the Thursday evening, we will get either the case protagonist or an expert in that thing that we’ve discussed to come and do a session with all of the students, almost like a webinar. They will talk them through what actually happened as the outcome of that case study. How did that person think about it personally? What are some things that caught them unawares? And so it’ll be a debrief of the case study, hopefully with the person who was involved, that’s how we are intending to design it.” If that person is unavailable, he says, students will hear from an expert on M&A integrations or on business model innovation. “But we expect that for at least two of the three cases, we will have the actual protagonist from the case study come to a webinar with all of those students.”

By the end of the course, students will have done the prep for the case study, submitted something for that, participated in it, had this debrief session, and then do a short reflection paper after that, Fisher says. “And then they’ll cycle through that three times. And we believe that’ll be a pretty interesting integrative experience for them.”

TURN ON YOUR CAMERAS & BE READY TO BE CALLED ON

The technology available at the Jellison Studios helps bring all this together. With a little adjustment, professors can go a long way toward capturing the student experience of being in a live classroom surrounded by peers — though there will always be a slight difference, a small disconnect. Fisher employs the technology at his disposal as well as anyone, but he also brings a wealth of live classroom experience to the table, or as he says, “just a few things that are fairly similar to what I’ve used in the typical classroom, which work well, which I’m trying to integrate into the online space because of that slight disconnect.”

Among them: insisting that students turn on their cameras.

“They must have their cameras on to participate,” he says. “And I instruct them that where possible try and have at least some gallery view, so that you can see when you or other people are presenting what they’re presenting and how they’re presenting. The third major thing is, I tell them upfront, ‘I’m going to cold call — be ready.”

Cold calling works because students are expected to do the reading at home before logging in to class. It’s a  pedagogical technique called “flipped classroom learning,” which aims to increase student engagement and learning by reserving class time for work on live problem-solving. The result is a more valuable and dynamic class experience — and a shorter one. Flipped learning allows Kelley Direct to keep class times to just over an hour, reducing Zoom fatigue.

Jackie Pham has a friend in another online MBA program that has three-hour classes. By comparison, flipped learning and shorter classes are much more appealing, Pham says.

“That’s another thing that Kelley does really well, comparing it to my friend’s experience. We started an MBA at the same time and his classes are three hours long,” Pham says. “So that’s where that Zoom fatigue can come in. Kelley program is only an hour and 10 minutes. What you do is, you learn first the material and then you go into class, you’re discussing the material, you’re not lecturing on the material. So that way it enables them to only spend an hour, they don’t have to do three-hour-long classes.”

STRONG NETWORKING A HALLMARK OF THE PROGRAM

Vaibhav Junnarkar graduated this summer. He closed out his Kelley Direct experience by attending a Global Connect Night event in Boston, driving in from his Hartford, Connecticut home, then going to Ireland for a week-long global immersion.

It’s a level of in-person activity he never expected from an online MBA — and it has forever changed his network of friends, colleagues, and connections.

“I’ve met a lot of people throughout the program, through assignments, through the breakout sessions, during the lectures, Kelley On Campus, Kelley On Location,” he says. “I serve on the Student Leadership Association, so that has given me a tremendous opportunity to meet with other students in the program — and not just the students. I made relationships with the Kelley administrations, the graduate career services. So yeah, it has been a very pleasant experience working and networking in this program.

“I would definitely say that the networking has been really strong. The Kelley Direct program makes a tremendous amount of effort to make sure that people in an online program get in-person experience and those networking opportunities that usually most of the resident students get. The program makes it really a top priority to make sure that networking doesn’t take a backseat.”