Poets&Quants’ MBA Program Of The Year For 2022: Gies’ iMBA

Illinois Gies has five iMBA studios on campus. The iMBA has revolutionized online business education, and not just because of its $23K price tag. File photo

A RANGE OF STACKABLE OPTIONS OPENS UP NEW PATHWAYS TO THE DEGREE

MBA program of the year

W. Brooke Elliott, Gies executive associate dean of academic programs

From the start, Gies went with a stackable design, allowing students to start with a single course and apply it to the 72-credit-hour iMBA degree. But in the past year, the school gained university approval for a series of graduate certificates that disassemble its MBA curriculum into learning bundles. “A graduate certificate is a recognized credential from the University of Illinois,” explains W. Brooke Elliott, executive associate dean of academic programs. “It’s comprised of 12 credit hours and each of those courses and those credit hours you also see in our degree. So a learner could go from a MOOC on Coursera and stack it into a single credit-bearing course, or they could stack that single credit-bearing course into a 12-credit-hour graduate certificate, again, a recognized credential, and then at any point in time, they could take that campus graduate certificate and those 12 credit hours and they could stack it into the iMBA.”

There are even other options. During the pandemic, Gies launched a fully online master’s in management that can now be stacked into the iMBA. “And so you’re halfway there,” adds Elliott. “And we just believe it provides tremendous flexibility for a learner to proceed through education not in a linear path, but on their own terms.”

Both Brown and Elliott strongly believe that this is the future of higher education. “I think the demands of the workforce are such that people are going to need the ability to come back at any time in their career and access content that is relevant to them at that point in their lives,” says Brown. “And I think we are seeing, very slowly, more and more institutions start to recognize that and adapt.

SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO CHANGE AND ADAPT WILL PUT THEMSELVES AT RISK

“But let’s be honest,” he quickly adds. “We’ve been doing the degree model for 800 years. And institutions are, by their nature, I don’t mean this in a political sense, but they’re conservative in terms of how quickly they change. We have lots of processes and procedures and governance processes in place to protect the core of the university, which really is to preserve excellence, to preserve the role of faculty, and the governing institution. There are a lot of benefits to those processes, but it does mean that change comes about slowly. And I think one of the things that has really distinguished what we’ve done is that we have found a way to be agile and nimble and innovative in this space. It hasn’t been without some difficulties along the way, but I think more and more schools will follow.”

Institutions of higher education that are slow to adapt will be vulnerable, believes Brown. “Schools that don’t figure this out are really going to put themselves at risk in the long term because degrees aren’t going to go away, but I think the era in which degrees are pretty much the only thing that higher ed institutions are in the business of doing is over. That world has passed us by. We’re going to see that most of the growth heading into the future is going to come from sub-degrees, credentials, micro-credentials, and things of that nature. We’re trying to help set the standard, set the pace, and do it with a continued increase on quality, on academic excellence, as well as access, which is where we started.”

Indeed, the notion of making higher education more accessible at a time when student debt has become an economic and political issue was central to Gies’ ability to bust academic norms. “Part of it goes back to our mission,” says Elliott. “We are a land grant institution, so it is mission consistent for us to offer high-quality, flexible education at an affordable price. And when it’s mission consistent, then campus leadership is on board, and I think what’s most important, our faculty are on board. And so you had all of these very intelligent individuals that were driven by the same mission and we recreated the degree model.”

ONLINE CLASSES SUPPORTED BY TWO PROFS & UP TO 50 COURSE ASSISTANTS

That reinvention was core to the program’s success. “We didn’t simply take the model for our residential MBA and put it online,” points out Elliott. “We thought very differently about how to serve learners at scale. And that started with thinking about a stackable model, but also, we’ve wholly changed how we deliver a course. The course model is very distinct. At our maximum, we served almost 1,500 individuals in a single course, but we did that because we innovated early where we have a tiered course structure. We have a lead or a co-lead set of faculty members who are our very top-tenured faculty. A lot of times, we have an associate instructor and we have anywhere from 30 to 50 course assistants, and we heavily utilize technology. It’s that combination of this tiered-course model, plus being very innovative in the technology space to deliver at scale in a way that makes it also affordable for us. We need to be able to continue to invest in what we do and innovate, but it’s very important to us that we keep the price low so that it’s accessible to those both domestically and internationally.”

Brown attributes the success of the iMBA to the faculty and staff who have often worked feverishly to handle the tremendous growth of the program.”If you went back to when I was a brand new dean in 2015 and you asked me to give not an optimistic, but just a straight assessment of where we would be in terms of student satisfaction, in terms of retention rates, and graduation rates, I don’t think I could have imagined a better outcome,” says Brown. “We knew we had something good here, but it has exceeded our expectations.

“And I attribute that to the faculty and the staff who have worked so hard on this program and have brought their own creativity to bear on it and have really poured their passion into it,” he adds. “I really mean everybody that’s involved. There are hundreds of people in our college that have contributed to the success of these programs, from the folks that are running the cameras, to the people that are editing videos, to the course assistants, as well as obviously the faculty and leadership. So yes, I was surprised, but I guess I should stop being surprised because we just seem to keep delivering really, really great results.”

DON’T MISS: P&Q’S DEAN OF THE YEAR FOR 2022 or P&Q’S MBA ADMISSIONS DIRECTOR OF THE YEAR FOR 2022

 

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